


Heart Like a Socket

by Kyra



Category: New Girl
Genre: F/M, Fake Marriage, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Hospitalization, Hurt/Comfort, Insurance Fraud, Marriage of Convenience, Pretending To Be Married, Roommates, Sharing a Bed, Sleeping Together, Tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 19:15:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 34,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyra/pseuds/Kyra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick and Jess get married, get cozy, and get each other.  In that order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. how to commit insurance fraud

**Author's Note:**

> This story goes a/u from the season 1 episode Injured.
> 
> Many, many, many thanks to everyone who helped midwife this monster into existence: [blithers](http://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/works), [Care](http://archiveofourown.org/users/care/works) and [Annakovsky](http://archiveofourown.org/users/annakovsky/works) for strategic brainstorming, feedback and encouragement. [innie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/works) for a kick-ass beta job. Tumblr folk for general ongoing enthusiasm.
> 
> [Lovely fanart by casper.](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Het_Big_Little_Bang_2013/works/943952) Thank you!
> 
> Title from the song _Marry Me_ by St. Vincent.
> 
> If you'd rather read the entire story on one page (instead of chapter by chapter), [you can click here to view the whole thing](http://archiveofourown.org/works/943649?view_full_work=true).

What happened was: they got married for the insurance.

Which is crazy, and felt crazy at the time, but so did the idea of Nick maybe-probably having thyroid cancer. At least according to his ultrasound results. Probable enough that he needed exploratory surgery and maybe radiation and all kinds of things that sounded hella scary and turned out to be very, very expensive. Probable enough that it was desperate times, and everyone knew what those called for.

 

**THEN**

It was Schmidt's idea.

They'd gone back to the loft numbly after Nick came out into the waiting room looking pale, followed by a guy in a white coat who explained what they'd found. (Later Jess couldn't remember a single thing the doctor said, though she remembered nodding through the whole conversation. Schmidt and Winston didn't seem to be in much better shape. Thank god for Cece, who'd actually listened and remembered it all and written everything down on a legal pad back at the apartment when everyone kept asking her again what it all meant.)

They took turns showering off the night on the beach. When Jess came back out in clean, non-sandy clothes, her hair up in a wet bun, everyone was still sitting around the kitchen table looking freaked out. (Cece: frowning at her phone. Winston and Schmidt: still poking at the scrambled eggs Schmidt had made them all. Nick: hunched over at the far end, staring at his plate without eating anything.)

"Okay," she said, and smacked the table with her hands when she sat down. "Ideas?"

It took two hours before she'd admit they really had nothing. It was like a bad riddle without a punchline: How do you get some serious medical care for an underemployed bartender without insurance?

Suggestions she'd written down on the there-are-no-bad-ideas list in front of her: 

\- Pretend to be homeless and go to the shelter clinic on the next block.  
\- Sell plasma.  
\- Move to Mexico.  
\- Obamacare??? (That had led them down a confusing and unhelpful Google wormhole.)  
\- Insurance through the bar?  
\- Get a fake ID and pretend to be Schmidt, to use his work insurance. ("It's the Cadillac of plans!" Schmidt had moaned several times. "I wish I could just give it to you, buddy!") 

(At one point Jess said, "What about your family?" She actually didn’t really know anything about Nick's family. He didn’t talk about them much. Or, like, ever.

"No," said Nick, even terser than usual.

"But--" said Jess, and then saw both Schmidt and Winston shaking their heads at her. Okay. Well. She let it drop.)

Staring at the list, she felt like she was in a bad dream. How could this really be happening and how could there be nothing they could do? Her stomach was in knots and she was pretty sure she was going to cry in the next three-and-a-half minutes but maybe if she went to make herself tea no one would notice. She'd stopped looking at Nick's end of the table (looking at his face) half an hour ago. Because. She just couldn't.

Schmidt suddenly lifted his head out of his hands, eyes wide.

"Oh my god," he said. "I've got it. We could get married.”

"What now??" Jess said at the same time Nick said, "What the hell, Schmidt?"

"It's the only thing that makes sense," Schmidt said, sitting up straight and picking up steam. "I kept thinking how much it sucks that I can't get you on my PPO--" he over-enunciated each letter – “because of the Prop 8 nonsense.” He waved a hand dismissively. “But I just remembered, AssStrat provides domestic partner benefits!” He held up his phone, grinning. “Thank you, too many emails from HR.”

Nick was violently shaking his head back and forth.

“What? No. No no no.”

“We just have to prove we’ve been living together for long enough to qualify as common-law married,” Schmidt said. He had his shit-eating grin on. “Nine-plus years, buddy,” he pointed between himself and Nick. “Ten next spring. Who could turn down a nice couple like that?”

“Schmidt, I am not gay marrying you to get on your insurance benefits!” Nick shouted, voice cracking.

“It’s not actual gay marriage, it’s a domestic partnership!” Schmidt shouted back at an equal volume. “And you sure don’t seem to have a problem with me cooking your dinners or balancing your checkbook.”

“You balance my checkbook?!” Nick said, looking aghast.

“Guys, guys,” Winston interjected, before things could get any more out of control. “A little focus here.”

Nick and Schmidt each folded their arms and glowered at each other, in a way that would have made Jess laugh if the circumstances were different.

“Can someone please explain to Schmidt why his idea is crazy?” Nick said.

“Well, all your respective girlfriends might be hard to explain,” Cece offered.

Schmidt shot Cece a strange look, which Jess chose to ignore. 

The table lapsed into silence again and Jess found herself focusing hard on shading in the circles her handwriting had made on the list so she didn’t have to look at anyone else. 

“You could marry Jess," Schmidt mumbled, looking intently at a groove in the dining room table where he was running his thumbnail back and forth. Jess looked up fast to see everyone else staring at him. He shrugged and looked over at her. "Jess, you have insurance, right?"

Jess nodded dumbly. All hail the LA public school system teachers’ union.

“Well, perfecto,” Schmidt said, over-pronouncing the last word in the way that meant he was still a little annoyed, but Jess could see him warming to his topic. "Turns out you two crazy kids fell for each other. Roommates, shared shower shenanigans--" ("Ew!" said Jess) "--hormones everywhere, that honeymoon period when you do it in every position you can--" ("JAR," said Winston and Nick at the same time) "--and then you couldn't help it! You just eloped! Badda bing badda boom, you file some papers at City Hall, and bam, one more dependent on that healthcare plan, please."

Nobody said anything for a long minute. Jess was trying to figure out the inevitable flaw in the plan and she could tell from everyone else's faces they were, too, but--

"I… can't find anything wrong with it," Winston said, frowning. "It's absolutely insane. But we definitely don't have anything better. And I can't believe I'm about to say this -- I think it just might work."

Schmidt was beaming now, looking back and forth between Nick and Jess like he didn't understand why they weren't.

"Guys!" he said. "It's gonna be okay!" He grabbed Nick's hand where it was lying on the table. "You're going to live!"

Nick jerked his hand away and pushed back his chair.

"Nobody ever said I wasn't going to live, Schmidt!" he said, standing up, and oh, thank god he was angry again. Silent, hunched over Nick had been freaking her out all day.

Nick stomped over to the kitchen but didn't seem to know what to do when he got there, so he leaned against the counter, arms crossed, and glowered at them. (He winced as he settled against the counter, and oh yeah, his back, she couldn’t believe she'd forgotten what started this all.)

Jess had a complicated, interesting feeling in her chest. (Married! To NICK! What the HELL!)

"Will they--" she started. "I can just… do that? They'll let me?"

"Abso-frigging-lutely," Schmidt said, still grinning. "I read all the fine print on my plan last year. Yours is probably the same."

Beside Jess, Cece was looking something up on her phone.

"You can apply online for a marriage license in Los Angeles County,” she said. Jess took a deep breath. Wow, this was happening fast.

"You really think I should do this?" she said to Cece and for a minute it was just the two of them, like it had always been.

"You can get it annulled in a year or whatever," Cece said. And then, a little softer: "But you don't have to. Don't do it if you don't want to." Her voice was firm, and it was another paragraph in their long conversation called Taking Care Of People: You Are Not Obligated To.

Jess frowned and let herself think about doing that -- saying she couldn't, saying it was too weird, that they'd think of something else -- to see how refusing felt. It felt wrong. And that was how she made her decisions, so that was that.

"I'll do it," she said, looking at Schmidt instead of Nick.

Schmidt clapped his hands together once and did double finger guns at her. He was so excited that she couldn't help smiling. (It had been a fairly teary morning on many sides, even if everyone had been polite enough not to comment.)

"So it's settled!" he said.

"Um, no," said Nick. Everyone turned to look at him. He had one of his extra-frowny glares on and his arms folded even tighter than before.

"No way," he said. "No. This is nuts! Are you all crazy?!"

What followed involved a lot of yelling; Schmidt and Nick in the bathroom, where Schmidt had followed him when he'd tried to stalk off; Winston, over his shoulder, as he left Nick's room where he'd gone to have "a calm, reasonable conversation"; Winston and Schmidt at each other, briefly, over what the hell that comment was supposed to mean, until Jess broke it up. Etcetera.

Cece took off at some point and Jess spent the afternoon dozing on the couch (turned out sleeping on cold beach sand wasn’t all that restful) while Winston disappeared for his own nap and Schmidt went to the grocery store to stress-shop. After a long time Nick came out of his room and got a beer before slumping on the other end of the couch and turning on ESPN with the volume low. Jess curled on her side and watched him through her lashes while she tried to figure out what to say.

"I know you're watching me," he said, without looking away from the screen and she took a deep breath and opened her mouth.

(She didn’t say much that was new, really. It was just so different talking to Nick when they were alone.

But some of the things she said were new. Things like: I like you, too. Like: I really want you to stick around.) 

(“Plus,” she added, hoping he’d get that look, the one where he got that tired smile in spite of himself. “You can pay me back in Nick Bucks.”)

Nick was back in his room by the time Schmidt came back with the groceries and Jess was still on the couch but sitting up, checking her email on her phone. 

"Okay, listen," he said the second he walked in, kicking the door shut behind him and heading toward the kitchen with his armload of bags. "I think we just need to tell Nick--"

"He said okay," Jess said. "He said he'd do it."

Schmidt stared at her for a second and thudded his bags onto the kitchen island.

"Oh, now he will," he said. "Of course. Well. Good." He had his huffy voice on but when he turned to head back down for the rest of the groceries Jess could see him smiling.

**NOW**

Jess finds the notepad in the bottom drawer of her desk in August. She's organizing her school supplies because it suddenly seems really important to know what exactly she has even though she's not going to get to go back-to-school supply shopping this weekend because she's apparently not going back to school this year because that's what happens when you get fired and hey, check it, she's totally over the part where she cries about it, she's just trying out all her pens on a blank piece of paper, scribbling in circles to see which ones work and which ones should be thrown away, no matter how good they maybe once were.

The list is on the second page of a legal pad, and the blank page on top still has the impressions of Cece's firm writing, outlining everything the doctor said that first awful day. 

_Let's Get Nick Better_ Jess had written in big letters across the top of the second page, above the list of terrible ideas for free medical care. Seeing it again is so surreal it's almost like finding something she read about once in a book. It's been months and months now and in the rush of everything that came afterward she'd almost entirely forgotten this. 

It was like something that had happened to someone else and it takes a few seconds to remember that it's actually true. It happened and it worked. She got married to Nick. And she still is, actually. Married. To Nick. Nick who's been driving her crazy all week by being nice to her after she got fired, when last weekend he bitched her out for five minutes for making friends with a guy at the hardware store and spent half of Saturday complaining that she left too many bobby pins in the bathroom.

The list goes three quarters of the way down the page and the very last thing on it says 'get married?????'

So yeah. That happened.


	2. how to get caught

"… hey," Jess says carefully one morning, as she's in the middle of washing her face. At the sink next to her Nick is brushing his teeth. He raises an eyebrow.

"You know it's cool if you date people, right?" she says. "Cool with me, I mean. You… don't have to not date because of… the thing." She gestures vaguely between them. 'Because we're kind of married' seems a little intense to say.

"Mmnf!" he grunts, raising his other eyebrow to match, then bends over to spit. Jess waits while he scoops water into his mouth from the faucet and rinses twice.

"Oh yeah yeah yeah," he says when he straightens back up. "Completely. Never thought it wasn't."

"Okay good," she says. "Because… I just noticed that you hadn't all summer, so… I wanted to make sure you knew. That you could."

"Me?" he says, pointing to himself. "Not-- oh, no, no, I'm fine, I'm good, I get my action in. No, my-- junk gets busy." He looks like he regrets saying that as soon as it's out of his mouth and Jess knows with just about 100% certainty that he's lying. She gives him a dubious look and he gestures toward her with his toothbrush.

"But I hope _you_ haven't been single because you thought you shouldn't--"

"No!" Jess says. "Nooo. Me, keep it in my pants? 'cause of this? I get my itches scratched. With some sweet sweet action." She knows he'll know she's lying too but she's not going to lose this pity competition.

"Well … good," he says, forehead wrinkled.

"Good," she says, frowning back.

"All right," he says and drops his toothbrush in the cup. She busies herself rinsing out her facecloth until he leaves. 

Okay. She feels better for saying that. If neither of them has hooked up with anyone all summer, it's just a coincidence. They've both been busy with other things. Like hanging out every night on the roof with the guys. Nick has done something almost definitely illegal with the wiring to let them hook up a mini fridge and they've been keeping it stocked with beer funded by the Douchebag Jar. Schmidt has dubbed the hangout spot Xanabrew.

Still, the conversation’s maybe at the back of her mind a little later, when she meets Sam the Hottie. When she says he can come back home with her. And maybe a little every time he texts about swinging by to, quote, hang out, and she says yes.

==

Saturday morning: even though he closed last night, Nick's working the afternoon shift today so he's up, hunched over some coffee and the sports section of the paper at the kitchen table.

Schmidt keeps revving the blender, making some disgusting green gloop ("Post-run pro-shake," he'd said. "Gotta get my protein on.") and Nick is about to yell at him that it's already pulverized enough, when Jess lets out a little shriek.

She's by the front door where she's been sorting through the pile of the week's mail on the hall table, but now she's holding a letter and staring at it wide-eyed, her other hand over her mouth.

"Jess?" says Nick at the same time as Winston says "What's up?" from the couch without looking away from his computer screen. Jess doesn't answer either of them, just keeps staring at the letter, her eyes darting over it, so Winston puts down his laptop and goes over to join her. Nick watches him peer over her shoulder at it, frowning, and then he says, "Oh, shit."

"What?" says Schmdit, paying attention now. "What is it?"

Nick's already pushing back his chair to stand up. He and Schmidt get to the foyer at the same time and have a brief, silent shoving match over who gets to stand close enough to see, before Jess hands them the letter and they read it together.

"Oy," Schmidt breathes, but Nick doesn't say anything, eyes jumping down the page across a lot of very official sounding words: _investigation, insurance fraud, interviews, home visits, full cooperation_ \-- and right at the top, _the veracity of your marriage_.

Jess freaks out a bit and to be honest so do Schmidt and Winston. Nick spends a while calming Jess down and telling her it'll all be fine, interrupting himself to snap at Schmidt and Winston to chill the hell out.

To be honest, he’s a little glad he has to be the one staying calm for everyone else, because that's one thing he does know how to do. About the letter he feels kind of strangely numb, like the fact that their shenanigans had worked out was only a temporary reprieve from life smacking him in the face yet again. Like his time is up. Summer vacation over.

==

"Guys," Nick says. "This is not the plan of sane people! I'm just gonna turn myself in."

He, Winston and Schmidt are sitting around the kitchen table, the stupid letter sitting open between them. Jess had had plans of some kind and had let herself be talked into going out to get her mind off this and in the meantime Winston and Schmidt have decided on the world’s most hare-brained plan. Or second-most, after the one that got them into this mess in the first place.

"Are you half-witted?" Schmidt snaps. "Turn yourself in? This isn't the wild west. Besides, it's Jess who'd take the heat."

"I'm not allowed to say turn myself in but you can say take the heat?" Nick demands. 

"Besides," Schmidt says, ignoring him, "you'd never last in prison with that temper. Two days and you shiv someone and get put in solitary. Do you want that, Nicholas? Life in the pit in the hoosegow?"

"Hey hey hey," Winston interrupts loudly before they can get into it any more. "Listen. _I don't want to go to jail._ " He stands up and levels a finger at them, doing his Intense Guy Stare. Nick sighs. "We're all accessories here. One goes down, we all go down. Or did you forget who witnessed that marriage license?" He points to himself and Schmidt.

Nick had, in fact, forgotten. That whole day -- that whole time -- was so surreal he'd shoved it into the back of his head where he kept all the things he couldn't really process. Is witnessing the license of a fake marriage to an overly nice girl actually a crime? 

That’s beside the point, though. And he can't take it anymore. Don't they see--

"This is my _fault_ ," he bellows, shoving his chair back to stand up too. "I got you all into this. You can't just-- keep _doing_ things for me! It's not your job! To fix things!"

Schmidt and Winston both stare at him for a long moment and Nick can feel his pulse pounding. Then Winston rolls his eyes and Schmidt shakes his head at him.

"Shut up, man," Winston says, and they won't talk any more about it.

==

Jess comes home late from drinks and a movie with Sadie and Melissa to find every light in the loft on and all three of the guys up, clustered around the dining room table. Winston's on his laptop, a pen in his mouth and another behind his ear, staring fiercely at the screen. Schmidt's behind him, writing something on a piece of paper taped to the wall; in fact there are papers taped all over the walls, labeled with different colored markers, post-it notes stuck to some of them. As Jess watches, Winston takes the pen from his mouth and scrawls something on a legal pad beside him, without taking his eyes off the screen.

"What… is happening?" Jess asks, dropping her purse and stepping out of her flats.

Nick's sitting at the end of the table, elbows on his knees, frowning as he watches Schmidt write. At her voice, he turns and gives her a shrug and a half frown.

"We're going to prove we're really married," he says.

==

"So here's the deal," says Winston. He's in full-on research guru mode. Jess peeked at his screen and couldn’t even count how many browser tabs he had open.

"There's a whole investigatory process. Someone gets assigned to your case and conducts a series of interviews and home visits to see if you seem like people who actually wanted to get married or if it’s just a sham for the insurance benefits.

“The hardest part--"

"But what about--" Nick starts.

"Don't interrupt," Winston says without pausing. "The hardest part is going to be making sure you're ready for the personal interviews. They can ask you anything they want about each other, your relationship, anything they think real married people would know." 

He points his pen at each of them in turn. 

"As of right now we're in official pre-season training mode. Eyes on the prize. You're going to work your asses off to learn every single detail about every tiny insignificant fact about each other and then you're going to pick those asses up and work some more."

Jess blinks. It's always super weird when Winston's competitive streak comes out.

"There's also preparatory paperwork," Schmidt chimes in. He's holding a leather padfolio, which he manages to snap open one-handed. He taps a pen down the page as he reads. "Opening a joint bank account. Sharing a cell phone plan. Other legal technicalities--" (a word he manages to say with several extra syllables) "--to prove the, quote, veracity of your union." From the corner of her eye, Jess can see Nick make a pained face. "So I hope you like filling out paperwork, kids. 'Cause Uncle Schmidty's Paperwork Bootcamp is in session. Hoo!" He makes what Jess thinks is supposed to be an intimidating half-lunge towards her and Nick.

Jess doesn't know when she started smiling but her smile's getting bigger and she's got this warm glow in her chest that's not going away. When she looks over at Nick he's glowering at the room in general, arms crossed over his chest, and he won't catch her eye.

"Guys," she says. "You're amazing."

They all three blink at her like that’s not the response they were expecting but are willing to roll with it.

“Okay,” she says, pulling out a chair. “Where do we start?”

==

**THEN**

He'd woken up on the beach feeling -- not good exactly (okay, pretty shitty: he had a whale of a hangover and his back was still majorly messed up and all his clothes were stiff with salt) but calm. Hopeful, even, maybe. What would happen would happen: he'd go get the test and it would turn out to probably be nothing.

He'd really thought it was going to be okay.

They didn't let him go to any appointments alone, no matter how much he bitched about it. Someone always tagged along; he figured it was 50% because they thought he'd skip out on the appointment, 50% trying to make sure he didn't flip out and lose his shit in a hospital waiting room or something. (Also half the time his car wouldn't start, or was making what Schmidt called the Burning Barbie Doll smell.)

Winston was the best; they didn't talk much, which was how Nick liked it, mostly because hospitals gave Winston the willies and he spent a lot of the time staring at the floor and jiggling one knee. ("It's the smell," he said. "I get the heebie jeebies.")

Schmidt, on the other hand, talked a lot and insisted on filling out all of Nick's paperwork for him. (More than once it had devolved into a wrestling match over the clipboard, which Nick sometimes let him win, because he hated that Schmidt had his insurance number memorized but he hated filling out forms even more.)

Jess brought knitting or sometimes crocheting (which was apparently different) like the whole world was one giant arts-and-crafts corner. It drove him nuts and they'd argued about it so many times he could probably recite her side from memory.

And on one or two awkward occasions when no one else was free, Cece drove him and sat in the waiting room texting the whole time. 

It was kind of humiliating, like his mom had arranged a carpool for him because she didn't trust him to get home alone. But between medical questions and nurses poking at him and everyone acting like he didn't know how to fill out a piece of paperwork, he spent a lot of time lately feeling vaguely humiliated. He was kind of becoming a pro.


	3. how to get hitched

**NOW**

“Right,” says Winston. “These are your dossiers.” He’s holding two impressively thick stacks of colored index cards held together with binder clips and hands each of them one. Winston is clearly ready to be an FBI agent. 

The top card on Jess’s stack says NICK in big letters. She thumbs through it and realizes there’s a question on the front of each one and a corresponding answer on the back. 

“What food does Nick tell people he’s allergic to even though he just doesn’t want to eat them?” Jess reads out loud and turns it over. “Bananas, because they’re ‘freaky phallic monkey food’.”

“What?!” Nick says and leans in to see, his shoulder pressing against hers. “Where the hell did that come from?” He grabs the stack of cards from Jess and starts shuffling through it on his own. “Who came up with these?” he demands, looking up at Winston. “And I am not afraid of geese!”

Winston looks unfazed. 

“Schmidt and I collaborated on yours, Nick. Jess, we got a bunch of stuff from your Facebook page and Cece. Oh, and what you put on your rental application.”

Jess frowns and reaches over to grab the other stack from Nick’s lap. 

“Um, you have my height completely wrong,” she says after skimming through them quickly. “And my favorite food. And the name of my grad school—“

“—right, right, yeah,” Winston interrupts, waving her off. “It’s a collaborative process, we’re definitely gonna need you to go through and make corrections, this is just to get us started.”

Jess rolls her eyes and leans over Nick to grab a pen off the side table. She starts crossing things off her cards and writing in the correct answers, while Nick stops looking at his own stack and watches.

“Okay, trade back when you’re done,” says Winston, “and then take ten minutes to go through them. And _then_ \--” he says, holding up a stopwatch and getting a kind of maniacal grin on his face. “Let the games begin.”

==

The facts aren't the problem. He's got his answers mostly down (kinda down) and he knows Jess pretty well anyway. But whenever Winston forces them to do a dress rehearsal ("in character! I'm not Winston anymore! Jess, have I not made my rule on giggling _perfectly_ clear?") he starts sweating faster than -- something really fast and sweaty and gross. It's the same if it's Schmidt or Cece playing Intimidating Insurance Investigator.

"Now," says Schmidt, in an over-the-top campy voice. He adjusts the glasses he's insisted on wearing for the role. "Mr. Miller. When did you first know you had feelings for Ms., uh, Day here? And in the definition of feelings I will accept sexual fantasies."

"SCHMIDT," Nick says and behind him Winston presses the no-breaking-character buzzer he’s appropriated from the loft Taboo box. Nick winces, hunching away from the sound. Again.

"Fine, fine, sorry," he says. He clears his throat and starts over.

"Well, uh, it was when--" He knows this, they've practiced it. "When we spent-- Christmas. And, uh. We're roommates?" He puts his face in his hands, glad Jess isn't here to see this for once.

"Let's try an easier one," Schmidt says, looking at Nick over his glasses. "Where did you get married?"

"At City Hall," Nick answers promptly.

"City Hall?!" Schmidt says. His accent is veering increasingly Long Island. "Well that's not very romantic. Just wanted to rush through everything, son?"

"No!" Nick says a little too loudly. "No, we just. Didn't want to drop a wad of cash on some dumb wedding."

"And the bride?" says Schmidt incredulously. Maybe it's more a Yiddish thing he's doing. "She felt this way too?"

"Yes," he says. "Maybe, no. I don't know. She, uh. She seemed happy." This is good, this is better, right?

"And your best man, was he very handsome?" asks Schmidt.

"Time," says Winston behind him, before Nick throws something at Schmidt. Nick twists around and looks up at him hopefully. Winston presses his lips together and shakes his head, pointing to Nick's forehead. When he reaches up it's soaking wet, and he realizes sweat has trickled all the way down the sides of his face and is now making its way down his neck. He lets out a loud groan and buries his face in his hand.

"From the top," Winston says. "Nick. Calm down. _No one's going to know you're lying._ You just do it, okay?" He makes it sound so easy.

==

**THEN**

They went to City Hall together on a Tuesday, all five of them. Jess was wearing an off-white dress with an A-line skirt that she'd bought a few months back for a garden party she was going to with Paul.

"Nice shoes," Schmidt said when they picked her up at Cece's. She was wearing bright red flats, because she still sucked at heels and this was only a fake wedding anyway. Well. Real wedding, fake marriage.

Schmidt had managed to wrestle Nick into a suit and tie and he looked surprisingly good. It was always weird to see him in anything that wasn’t a hoodie with mac and cheese stains on the front.

Nick was nervous, which meant he was sweating, and he kept jiggling his leg while they sat in the waiting area. His jacket was on the back of the chair and in his white shirt his chest looked-- well. Way broader than a slouchy t-shirt ever showed. Jess bit her lip and looked away. She was across and diagonal from him in their little corner of chairs, sitting next to Cece. 

Beside her, Cece reached out and slipped her hand into Jess's. When Jess looked over, she smiled and gave it a squeeze and Jess felt herself relax a little. Sure this was weird, but it would be okay, right? Right.

"For crying out loud, what's taking so long?" Nick muttered. He had slid down in his chair, stretching out so his legs and scuffed-up dress shoes filled the space beside her. He didn’t look sick. But he did look like someone who knew he was sick; wearing the closed-off inward expression he’d had most of the time since last week. Since she was standing next to him in Sadie’s sunny office and the world had gone diagonal and continued on in this new direction.

==

When it came down to it, she felt lightheaded and nervous standing next to him, almost like she was outside her body looking at herself. Her heart was pounding and her face felt hot and when she looked over at Nick his forehead was all sweaty. He swallowed hard, not looking at her, and if only for him she slipped her hand into his. He jumped a little and looked over at her, face unreadable. She gave him a small tight smile and squeezed his hand and after a minute he squeezed back, his thumb stroking over the back of her hand once.

Then the door opened and the Justice of the Peace came in and everything started to happen. Her heart kept pounding and she hung onto his hand for the whole thing.

==

It was faster than she expected, after all the paperwork and line-standing. Wham, bam, thank you Justice Stevens, ma'am. 

"… and that's it," said the Justice. "I now pronounce you legally married in the state of California." Nick's hand was squeezing hers even tighter. "So," she said, a bit more warmly. "You can kiss the bride, kiss the groom, all that fine stuff."

Jess felt a shot of adrenaline down her spine. She hadn't thought of this and she could tell from the look on Nick's face he hadn't thought of it either. Neither of them moved and the Justice's indulgent expression started to fade.

"Smile!" Cece hissed from behind her and oh. Right. 

She put on her best fake happy face and looked up at Nick, who wasn't managing to fake anything and oh god, the Justice was going to KNOW, she'd undo the whole thing, what would people who actually wanted to get married do? And before she could think anymore she stood up on her tiptoes and kissed Nick fast. He didn't even have time to react (which was a little bit of a shame because if you had to fake kiss your roommate at your fake-but-real wedding you'd kind of like to know what kind of kisser he was while you had the chance, purely for reasons of curiosity).

Schmidt and Winston whooped behind Nick, playing up their roles, and the Justice was smiling again and she could feel that her face was all hot and red. And that was it. Married, ladies and gents. The real deal, the whole shish kebab.


	4. how to tell the truth

**NOW**

Nick turns around during his Wednesday shift to find Cece sitting at the bar.

"Oh, hey," he says and looks behind her. "Meeting Jess?"

"G & T," she says instead of answering. All right then. She waits until he sets the tumbler down in front of her.

"Jess doesn't know I'm here," she says. "I came to see you."

Nick frowns.

"Well, that's unexpected."

"You have to learn to lie," says Cece. She sure doesn't beat around the bush. He keeps frowning at her.

"The practice sessions?" she says. "With the answers and the sweating? Painful."

"Really,” he says flatly. “That is totally new information.”

"I've been asking around about this whole thing," she says. "I know people who can get you out of stuff. Tickets, DUIs. And they say this is the real deal. It’s no joke. Prison time and everything." He swallows hard, hands clenching involuntarily on the bartop and she leans forward.

"Listen up," she says. "Jess is my best friend and she did you an incredibly huge favor and now you. owe. her." She keeps that unsettling gaze right on him and he wilts under it.

"I know," he says and scrubs a hand over his face. How could he not fucking know? "But what am I supposed to do? I'm no good at this."

Cece sits back in her chair, toying with the cocktail straw in her drink.

"You're going to tell the truth," she says. He brings his eyebrows together and waits for her to go on.

"Your roommates may be emotionally tone deaf or superstars at ignoring these kinds of things," she says. "But I’m not. And I've seen how you’ve been looking at her since, like, the day she moved in."

Nick holds up his hands.

"Whoa, wait, no--"

"No," Cece says, stopping him. "Jess is the one who gets to play the denial card. I'm not going to listen to it from both of you." Nick's stomach twists as he tries to process that. He swallows and tries out a dry chuckle.

"I, no, I think you've got the wrong idea."

She keeps looking at him, raising one eyebrow.

"I don't know-- I-- what-- you don't--"

He trails off and she waits 'til he lets his head drop, hands still braced on the edge of the bar. He takes a deep breath and looks back up and when she sees his face, Cece nods once.

"Good," she says and leans forward, resting her forearm on the bar.

"Now here's the thing. It's going to be so much easier than you think it is. You don’t actually lie. You just tell the truth."

He stares at her, completely lost. She sighs and he can almost see her resisting an eye roll.

"They're trying to figure out if there are legit feelings underneath this whole thing, right? If you got married because you actually like each other?" she says. 

He nods slowly and she goes on.

"So you're going to reach into your stockpile of repressed emotions--" he wrinkles his nose "-- and figure out what you can say that's true. Whatever things your Cro-Magnon sweat glands won't register as a lie."

He feels panicky even just thinking about _thinking_ about talking about his feelings. And Jess. And his feelings about Jess. 

"Cece--" he starts. "I can't-- I just--" He looks at her helplessly.

"Don't worry, Captain Panic," she says dryly. "You can still keep your crush on the down-low. It's all going to just seem like part of the game, right?”

Nick swallows hard.

"Here," she goes on. "Let's start with an easy one. How’d you meet Jess?”

“She answered Schmidt’s Craigslist ad,” he replies promptly.

“And what did you think of her?” Cece says. Nick opens his mouth and closes it right away. He stares at Cece, wordless and unnerved.

Cece leans forward and her voice gets a little gentler.

"I swear to god,” she says. “I'm not going to tell Jess any of this. And you don't know me this way, but I will take my secrets to the goddamn _grave_." The way she says it makes him believe it.

"So," she says, sitting back in her chair. “What did you think of Jess when she moved in?”

“I thought she was nice,” he blurts out. Okay. All right. He said it. Nobody knew that and he said it. “Kind of crazy. Kind of naïve.” He looks down at his hands again but now that he’s started being honest it turns out it’s kind of hard to stop. “Kind of cute,” he says fast.

Cece looks totally unfazed when he glances up.

“Good,” she says. “Keep it short, don’t overthink it, just get out the basics.” 

A customer slides into a seat at the other end of the bar and Nick holds up a finger.

“Hang on,” he says, suddenly worried she’ll think he’s blowing her off. He pulls an Anchor Steam, opens a tab for the guy, and is back in two minutes.

“Right,” she says without preamble when he shows up back in front of her. “What was your first date?”

Nick huffs out a breath and runs his hand through his hair.

“Okay,” he says. “Yeah. Um. We went to a wedding.” He stops and Cece raises her eyebrows like he should go on. “It was my old buddy from college.” He hardly remembers the actual wedding. Mostly that night is a blur of Caroline leaning into him, Caroline laughing, Caroline’s hand on his arm – and then the bite of room temperature whiskey, swigged straight from the bottle. Feeling sick to his stomach in a way that was equal parts about the booze and Caroline. 

But that’s not what he needs to talk about. He takes a deep breath and looks at the ceiling and remembers Jess in her ridiculous little dress. Jess on the dance floor, laughing. Jess being too fucking nice to him, as always.

“It was nice,” he says, looking back at Cece. “She, um. She looked good. We danced. It was fun.”

“And when did you know you liked her?” Cece fires back.

Nick winces and looks away. Not only does he not want to answer that, he doesn’t know _how_ to answer that.

“Well you know,” he tries. “With people. And when you’ve known them. There are just always, you know, the mysteries of—do any of us even really know ourselves, man? You know?”

He deserves the look Cece gives him but it’s not pleasant. 

“We’ll come back to that.”

She stays for the rest of the night, rattling off questions whenever he has a minute between customers. Her head's like a damn detective’s Rolodex: none of Winston's stupid flashcards here and she has tons of questions they hadn't thought of yet; he's going to have to tell Winston to pick her brain.

Nick genuinely feels like he's going to throw up every time she asks him something and waits for an answer. He tells her so several times, but she's not swayed.

“Why’d you hit it off with Jess?” she says as soon as he gets back from making a round of salt-rimmed margaritas for a group of coworkers in cardigans and sad ties.

Nick huffs out a long breath and makes a pained face. He’s trying here, he really is.

“Fine, try this,” Cece says. “Why did you and Jess end up becoming friends?”

That’s _slightly_ easier.

“Sheer exposure,” he jokes and instead of frowning at him, Cece makes a go-on expression. “She’s… better to talk to than the other clowns I live with. She’s kind of just _nice_. …And I don’t really think anyone’s nice.”

“See?” she says. “You can use the saaame answers. Not that hard.”

“One sec,” says Nick; he closes out a tab for one of the regulars and comes back.

“Okay,” says Cece, pointing her cocktail straw at him. “You and Jess. Typical date.”

Nick gives her a look.

“Think about how to rephrase it…” Cece prompts in her wearily patient voice.

“A typical... hangout?” he says. She gives him a small nod so he presses forward.

“Um. Probably hanging out at home. Or here. Having a drink. Maybe watching tv. Uh. Low key.”

It must be okay because instead of saying anything she slides her empty glass across the bar toward him for a refill.

“Are you guys on the same page about kids?” she says. Nick casts his eyes upward and thinks: short. Basics.

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “She wants kids. I—I want kids. Uh. She’s good with kids. The whole teacher thing.”

By the time the night’s over, Nick’s sweated through both his undershirt and his flannel, but he’s gotten faster at answering and Cece’s only rolling her eyes at him every third answer. So he’s going to count this as a win.

**

Jess is heading into the bathroom when she realizes Nick and Winston are in Winston’s bedroom with the door half open. Nick's sitting on the edge of the bed, legs apart and hands on his knees, while Winston stands in front of him holding the omnipresent stack of index cards.

“Okay, here’s another,” Winston says, reading from a card. “Have you discussed marriage with any other partners and how did that influence your decision to get married now?”

From where she’s standing, Jess can see Nick staring at the carpet, rubbing his palms absently on his knees.

“Caroline and I did—sometimes. But I think we both knew it was a terrible idea. Jess is—easier to get along with. Like way, way easier, even when she’s driving you crazy. She’s just… she’s the kind of person guys think about marrying.”

"… damn," says Winston. "I don't know what happened but you have gotten a lot better at this." He squints at Nick. "Are you on Xanax?"

"No, I'm not on Xanax," Nick says in his annoyed voice. "Maybe I'm just better at this stuff than you realize. You underestimate me."

Winston snorts out a laugh. 

"That is not even a little bit true, but I don't care. Just keep doing whatever it is you're doing." He claps Nick on the shoulder and turns to head out of the room. Jess quickly flings herself away from the door and into the bathroom. 

"Underestimator!" she hears Nick yell.

==

It’s weird. Listening to Jess rattle off facts about him as Winston quizzes her from his stack of flashcards. Nick’s playing Call of Duty, but it’s pretty hard to ignore Jess, lying upside down on the couch with her legs over the back, firing off his favorite color and date of birth and brother’s name and college major. She’s wearing tights but her skirt has slipped down so he can see the dark seam at the top of her thighs. 

“Height?” says Winston.

“Five ten,” she says as he mouths it along with her.

“Does Nick have any allergies?” Winston asks, like a game show announcer and there’s a pause. Nick glances over to see Jess frowning.

“Sunshine?” she asks after a second and Winston laughs.

“Vegetables,” he says.

“Soap,” says Jess.

“Manners,” says Winston.

“Guys, I’m _right here_ ,” Nick says, clicking rapidly at the controller as his onscreen self gets pinned down.

It’s kind of a relief when he gets the email from Amelia saying she’ll be in LA and hinting that she needs a place to crash. A welcome distraction. He needs to get his head out of this whole… thing.

==

“Girl roommate, huh?” Amelia says, peeking into Jess’s empty room. It’s kind of surreal having her here, almost as surreal as finally (finally!) seeing her naked. He’d spent a _lot_ of time in college imagining what she looked like naked. “Does that ever get weird?”

He briefly imagines telling her that it does, actually, ever since they went and got married a little while back. But still sleep with other people. Except for, oh yeah, that one time they made out when he thought he was dying and never talked about it.

Instead he shrugs.

“Nah,” he says and catches her fingers in his.

==

It’s almost a relief later when he’s fucked things up with her and she’s gone, leaving only the sense-memory of her slap on his face. It matches the throbbing spot where Jess had gotten in her vengeance punch and man, that girl has more of a right hook on her than he would have guessed.

Lying in bed, he presses his fingers against the tender place where Amelia’s hand connected with his cheek, and then the bruise from Jess’s fist. How would it have even worked, anyway, trying to date her and act married to Jess, all at the same time? How did everything in his life get so complicated?

(Schmidt and Winston had both said similar things to Jess to try to make her feel better about Sam dumping her. 

“I mean, let’s be real here,” Schmidt said in his pseudo-gentle voice. “Would you want to have to explain to the insurance agency why you’re boning someone else?” It hadn’t gone over well.)


	5. how to lie

Winston has been keeping a sign on the fridge door counting down the days until their huge initial interview with the investigating agency. It stares Nick in the face every morning when he opens the fridge door like a friendly reminder of how much he’s panicking about it. He muffles the feeling by swigging orange juice out of the container, even though Schmidt would have a hygiene-related fit if he knew.

And today it’s gone, because today’s the day. Nick showers fast, pulls on a mostly-clean button down and a blazer and makes a face at himself in the mirror.

Schmidt inspects them at the door. 

“Dude,” he says. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” For a second Nick thinks he wants a hug, ‘til Schmidt holds out a hand with their fake wedding rings in it. Nick had completely forgotten they existed.

“Oh yeah,” Jess says and reaches out for hers. Nick swipes his out of Schmidt’s hand and turns away to put it on fast, trying hard not to think about Jess sliding it on his finger at the courthouse.

“Are we going or what?” he grumbles and heads out to call the elevator.

 

==

Winston drives them down to the interview.

"I'm not having anyone panicking and driving around the block twelve times," he points at Jess, "or winding up fighting chickens in Mexico," he says sternly to Nick. "I didn't work this hard for you two to blow this." They both argue, but he's adamant, so finally it's easier just to give in. Nick glares out the backseat window the whole way. Jess is sitting shotgun and can see his face in the side mirror: his clean-shaven jawline, the jacket Winston and Schmidt had forced on him because "no actual married dude's wife would let him out of the house looking like that."

In the parking lot, Winston reaches under the seat and pulls out a shot glass and a bottle of Jaegermeister. Jess pauses with her seatbelt halfway off.

"You're… going to get us drunk?" she says.

"Not you," Winston says. "And not Nick either." He twists around in his seat to look at Nick. "Schmidt and I talked it over. One shot to calm you down. More and you'll get antagonistic, less and you'll soak clean through that shirt before you get through the door."

The corners of Nick's mouth pull down hard but instead of arguing with that logic, he just says, "… _Jaeger_ , Winston? Really?!" Winston ignores him and pours the shot.

"It's Schmidt's," he says as he passes it into the back seat. "Bottoms up." Nick opens and closes his mouth several times, like there are too many things he wants to say for any of them to come out.

"Goddammit," he says finally, and does the shot. " _Blech,_ " he says, shuddering, and spends the whole time getting out of the car bitching loudly about pansy-ass candy-flavored liqueurs and the douchebags who drink them. It's the most he's said all morning and the first thing that hasn't involved predicting their failure.

Jess gets out after him and bends back down to give Winston an I-see-what-you-did-there smirk through the window. Winston winks at her and Jess turns and darts after Nick, who's marching resolutely towards the front door without looking back.

==

They've only been in the waiting room three minutes and Nick's knee is jiggling like crazy, like he's going to stand up and blow their cover at any second. Jess flips a page in the old _US Weekly_ she's pretending to read and mumbles "body language!" brightly through her teeth without looking at him.

Nick stops and she can hear him take a deep breath through his nose, like maybe he was actually listening during one of Schmidt's 300 lectures on zen breathing. There's no exhale though -- Jess counts silently and when he hasn't breathed out by five-mississippi, reaches a hand over to squeeze his knee.

He lets out his breath all in a whoosh and Jess rubs a thumb over the inside of his knee until he seems to have resumed breathing at a normal pace. She's not really focusing on her magazine. Taylor Swift broke up with somebody again, maybe? After a long minute Nick's hand closes over her own, where it's still on his knee, and squeezes a little. It’s warm and solid and she realizes she’s been holding her breath too.

==

She jumps when they’re finally called in and scrambles to put her magazine back and grab her purse and coat and scarf. As they head down the hallway, Nick places a hand on the small of her back, light and warm, and steers her along. It’s so unlike Nick and so casually done that she jumps a little and almost shoots him a look, ‘til she remembers this is supposed to be the kind of thing they do. 

==

The first half of the interview is easy; Jess could answer these questions in her sleep and knows Nick could too.

Where did Nick go to college? What do Jess’s parents do? Which of them does the budgeting?

Maybe they're rattling things off a little too easily, though, because the questions start to get weirder.

"I apologize in advance for the personal nature of some of these questions," says the man interviewing them, who she already can’t think of as anything but Monobrow. "But I'm sure you understand, given the circumstances."

Jess nods brightly, before she's fully registered what he's saying, then pauses and darts a quick glance over at Nick, who's starting to frown. The guy glances down at his list again.

"How many children would you like to have?" Okay, easy. This was on Winston's cards; he'd written, 'Jess: 2, Nick: 0' which she remembers because Nick kind of flipped out at him about making assumptions and thinking he knows Nick's life and by the time they got him calmed down it had come out that Nick actually wanted 3 kids, maybe 4, which everyone had kind of blinked at as Nick glared at all of them.

"Well, I've always wanted two," Jess starts, "but Mister Procreation here would like a couple more than that. So we'll see how _that_ round of Jenga goes, eh?" She winks at Monobrow and mock-elbows Nick, who's giving her the look that makes her realize she's slipped into a silly voice again. Which Winston and Schmidt had both expressly forbid, but what _ever_ , she answered it, everyone needs to calm down. "See if I can keep this one off me," she adds lamely, and Nick's expression shifts to one of amused horror oh god what is she saying.

"And family planning?" continues Monobrow. 

"Wh-who now?" Jess says.

"Contraception. What kind do you practice?" he says again, and Nick blurts "condoms!" right as she says, "oh, the pill." 

Fuck.

Jess tries to laugh breezily but can tell it comes out sounding nervous.

"Well, you know, we started with condoms," she says, "but I just got on the pill, so we're transitioning over. Plus. You know. You can never be too careful. Double bag it, that's what I always say! Except you shouldn't actually double bag it, that increases the chances of condoms tearing, and nobody wants that. But if it does happen, you can still get your hands on some Plan B, you know, and hey, did I mention I teach middle school sex ed classes?"

Both Nick and Monobrow are openly staring at her as she gulps in a breath of air.

"… also the pill helps with cramps?" she offers weakly.

The man clears his throat and makes a note on his paper.

"And your sleeping arrangements?" he asks. Jess thinks he probably means which side of the bed they each have, but Nick's brain must still be on creepily prying sex questions.

"Together," he says a little too loudly. "In bed. Together. Naked." His eyes widen even as he's saying it oh dear godddd what is he doing.

“… right,” says the investigator and makes another note.

**

Her interview alone with the guy is basically more of the same, with a lot more specific questions about precisely when they found out about Nick's health stuff and how that whole timeline related to getting married. She sticks to the practiced answers and crosses her toes in her shoes in hopes that they'll match up with Nick's.

"… and this was how long after you two became involved?" he asks as he's writing something else down.

"Three months," she says promptly, thank you flash cards. 

“And how did that come about?” he asks.

She's practiced this story so many times it almost feels like it actually happened. How Nick missed his flight home for Christmas and she was staying in town anyway so they ended up spending a lot of time alone together and she'd just broken up with her boyfriend Paul and one thing led to another. But how the spark had been there before: that time she saw him naked and it was really weird for both of them. The time he'd come home drunk and fallen asleep on the couch with his head in her lap, face pressing into her stomach while she watched a rerun of _Buffy_. Or when they went on a date to a wedding together and spent half the night on the dance floor.

It’s a nice story. The kind of story you tell at a dinner party when someone asks how you met your husband. The kind of story she wishes were true.

**

If possible, she's even more nervous during Nick's interview than her own. They're so close, though, they’re almost through this hurdle. And then the yelling starts.

By the time she gets back down the hall to the door of the interviewer's office, Nick's voice is even louder.

"-- questioning our relationship! You want to see how married we are, mister, you come right on by and I'll show ya married."

"Nick!" Jess says loudly, throwing open the door without knocking. Nick's leaning far forward in his chair, finger pointed angrily at Monobrow. They both turn to look at her. "Nick!" she says again. "Honey! Everything… going okay in here?"

Nick's still all wild-eyed and she's not sure he's even really seeing her.

"I'm tired of people not understanding … this," he says, gesturing between them. “We are what we are.”

“Like Popeye,” she says dumbly. Not that Nick eats spinach. Or anything healthy. Where does he think he's going to get the energy to raise four kids?

“Actually,” Monobrow says. “I’m glad you mentioned coming by.” He slides a paper across the desk and Nick leans forward to look at it. Even from the doorway Jess can see the heading across the top of the paper: Authorization of Home Visits.

==

It turns out they would have had to sign the form even without Nick’s little outburst. Standard procedure, they said. No big deal, just means they can stop by whenever they want, as often as they want, until the officer assigned to their case is ready to make a report. But of course they won’t mind, right? Nothing to hide, no? 

How fabulous, Nick thinks. How fucking peachy keen.

==

Winston puts them through a full-on debrief at home that night. What they got asked, what they said, whether any of their answers in the one-on-one interviews didn’t match up.

Jess is sitting at the dining room table giving him the run-down while Nick plays a video game with his back to them and only contributes when Winston asks him a direct question.

Jess is nibbling on her thumbnail trying to remember what she hadn’t been prepped for. Her head is spinning with stupid facts and fake stories and stuff she memorized and never got to say.

“Oh!” she says. “I got asked how often we, uh, do it? The funky monkey? Ride the bus to pleasure town?” As soon as she says it she wishes she hadn’t brought it up.

“Damn,” Winston mutters, making a note on his pad. “You get that one too, Nick?”

“Yup,” Nick says, still not turning around.

“And?” Winston prompts.

“I said twice a week,” Nick mutters.

Winston catches Jess’s reaction.

“What’d _you_ say?” he says, frowning, and Jess shrugs, trying to play it cool.

“Um. Oh yeah. Like four times.”

“A month?” he says.

“A week,” she says and Winston chortles. 

“Damn, girl.” 

Behind her she hears the sound of the game pausing and turns to see Nick smirking at her a little, eyebrows raised. 

“ _I_ don’t know, I had to make something up!” she says. 

“Well, props on the active imaginary sex life,” Winston says and Jess can feel her face getting hot.

“Shut up, I hate you both,” she mumbles and focuses really intently on lining up the utensils by her plate.

So she likes sex, okay? Being with Sam made her realize some things. And she was trying to be realistic based on the little information at hand. They’re supposed to be newlyweds. And Nick’s a pretty intense guy in general. Plus he and Amelia sure spent a lot of time in his room while she was here. What’s she supposed to think?

==

He almost, _almost_ gives in and teases her about it. _Four times a week?_ he wants to say when they end up brushing their teeth at the same time. But what if that _is_ a normal amount and he’s the one who lowballed it? Is that how much sex she has? Or wants to have? Or thinks he wants to have?

This whole thing is basically a debacle.


	6. how to shack up

**THEN**

Nick waited as long as he could before coming out of his room the morning of the surgery. The other three were already up and dressed, sitting somberly around the breakfast table. He was already into the time window of not being allowed to eat or drink anything and goddamn did he not want to sit around and look at their morose faces or get cornered into any conversations he wasn’t ready to have, so he stopped by the front door, fingering the keys in the pocket of his hoodie. They all looked up at him (Jess’s eyes were huge in her face) and Nick scratched the back of his neck.

"Ready?" he said.

==

He sat shotgun on the ride to the hospital and didn’t say anything while the other three alternated between nervous chatter and gloomy silence.

In the side mirror he could see Jess’s face where she was sitting behind him, looking pale and exhausted. She caught his eye twice and both times he looked away. He knew she wanted to talk about last night – The Thing That Happened – but he knew she wouldn’t do it with the other two around and yeah, he wasn’t proud, but he was going to ride that all the way into the operating room.

==

Sitting in the waiting room knowing somewhere not too far away Nick was getting sliced into was one of the worst ways Jess had ever spent a morning. Cece had met them at the hospital for moral support, and was flicking her eyes over whenever Jess checked the time on her phone, basically every three minutes. Glaciers had moved across continents, empires had risen and fallen by the time someone finally called her name. They all straightened up as the doctor came over in her scrubs, operating mask pulled down.

"He's out," she said. "Everything went well, but we'll have to wait for the results of the biopsy to determine if there's further treatment needed."

Jess let out the big breath she'd apparently been holding at the same time that Winston scrubbed his hands over his face in relief.

"He's still under anesthesia, but you can see him now, if you'd like."

They all stood up at the same time.

"I'm sorry, immediate family only," said the doctor. Nobody moved 'til Cece elbowed Jess in the ribs.

"Oh!" she said. "I'm his, uh--," she cleared her throat. "Um, his wife?" She really needed to work on saying that less like a question.

Beside her Schmidt made a small resentful noise.

"Tell him I said hi," he said as the doctor started to lead her away. "No, wait, tell him I said stay cool, brother. And hang in there, big guy. And YTMND. You're the man now--"

Luckily the swinging door cut off the rest.

==

Nick was out cold, which she'd expected, but he looked so different, which she hadn’t.

He seemed smaller, kind of, and younger. Asleep his face looked—more open, less sarcastic or pained-by-the-world or whatever his normal Nick face was. There was a large white bandage on the side of his neck and an IV needle taped to the back of one hand. Machines with steadily blinking lights did their steady blinking light thing around the head of the bed.

Jess stood in the doorway for a long time, watching the rise and fall of Nick's chest, his hands where they lay on the white hospital blankets. The far side of the bed had a chair and after a while she made her way across the room and curled up in it.

Nick's hand was resting on the bed near her; funny to think about all the times she'd seen it squeezing lime wedges into drinks at the bar or slapping Schmidt on the back of the head or changing out a drill bit while he fixed the wobbly kitchen shelf.

And now it was here, totally still against the hospital sheets. She leaned forward for a minute and covered it with hers. Squeezed just a little, in case he could feel her.

 

**NOW**

The first home visit comes just after 8 in the morning on a Tuesday. Jess is in her room getting dressed and Nick is still very much sound asleep and thank all the gods in heaven that Schmidt hasn't quite left for work yet so he can answer the door and call for Jess and sneak into Nick's room to hustle him out of bed and into the hallway while Jess is showing the investigator the kitchen to make sure she doesn't see Nick come out of a different bedroom.

"What the hell, man?!" Nick is yelling, still half asleep, hair pointing in every possible direction. He’s trying to elbow Schmidt off of him as he propels them into the living room.

"Your lovely wife asked me to wake you!" Schmidt yells, gripping Nick's upper arms tighter and over the inspector's shoulder Jess can see Nick suddenly stop struggling and blink, trying to process.

"Honey!" says Jess really brightly. "Look who's here."

Her name is Samantha and she has long mousy hair she has a habit of swinging behind her shoulder with a head toss and a kind of sardonic way of asking questions. She looks around at everything really closely and squints her eyes a little at some of the things Jess says. Jess misses Monobrow.

==

Nick glowers at Schmidt his whole way out the door for work while Jess is answering questions from the investigator. Who, he'd like it noted, he hates already. He's leaning on the wall trying to pay attention when Jess starts gesturing to him frantically about something behind the lady's back. _What?!_ , he mouths back. _What are you saying?!_

Jess gives him an exasperated look and points at her left hand. No, her finger. Her _ring finger_ , on which she’s of course not wearing a wedding ring. Oh shit.

His eyes go wide just as what's-her-face looks up. Jess slips her left hand into the pocket of her skirt and he quickly shoves both of his into the pockets of the workout shorts he was sleeping in.

"Mind if I look around?" asks the investigator (Sarah? Stephanie?) heading toward the hallway.

"Oh!" says Jess jumping up, just as Nick's brain completely freezes up. He tries to slip in front of her so she can't go any further without making it look like that’s what he’s doing.

"I'm actually really late for work already," she says, "and Nick has to drive me, my car's in the shop. Could you come back tomorrow?”

The lady squints a little suspiciously at them, then checks her watch and sighs.

“I’m busy tomorrow,” she says, “but yeah, we can wrap up for the day.” When she turns toward the door, Jess gives Nick a superfast double thumbs up, eyes wide, before quickly shoving her hands back in her pockets and smiling sweetly at what’s-her-face.

"Okay," says Jess after they (finally!) hustle the lady out and shut the front door behind her. She leans back against it, then slides down to the floor. Nick drops to sit beside her.

"First rule," she says, then abruptly pops up on her knees and crawls the two feet to the hall table. "We wear these all the freaking time," she sits back down holding the fake wedding rings she'd grabbed from the bowl where they'd been sitting since their interview. The same ones they’d put on each other way back when, the day they got married. Just thinking the phrase makes his stomach feel strange.

Jess settles back down beside him, leaning against the door.

"Here," Jess says, and holds out his ring, the one Schmidt had produced on such tight notice which, miraculously, did not involve any puka shells or skulls. The tips of her fingers just barely touch his palm when she hands it over. He holds her gaze as he slides it on and then immediately wishes he hadn't. It's one of those moments they fall into sometimes, tilting toward weighty and strange without warning.

Jess smiles at him a little uncertainly, slipping on her own, and he frowns and clears his throat.

"This feels weird," he says. "I don't like it. It's weird." He lifts up his hand to show her. "My fingers don't go together there now."

"You baby," Jess says. "I think you can get used to wearing _one piece_ of man jewelry. Other dudes do this for years, you can man up for a few … months?"

They haven't actually talked about this: how long the investigation will take. What will happen afterward. The whole Needing To Get Divorced thing hanging over their head.

"Hey," he says indignantly instead of addressing all… that. "You don't think I'll do this for years someday? I could be a great damn husband."

Even as he's saying it, it doesn't feel true, sounds so defensive it loops around to sad, and he wishes he could look away before he sees her reaction. She just laughs, though, and pats his knee.

"I'm sure you will," she says, and he's sure she means it to be casual but he can also tell she really believes it, with that excessive Jess optimism that makes her think of everyone as better than they are. He can't think of anything to say in response to that so it hangs in the air between them. Jess swallows, smile fading a little, but doesn't move her hand.

"Damn straight I will," he says finally and she laughs and pulls her hand away and stands up, giving him a brief flash of thigh in the process.

==

So they move his stuff into Jess's room. And his bed out of the apartment entirely.

"This doesn't make any sense," Nick says for about the 14th time, arms folded while Schmidt and Winston are emptying his room of furniture.

"It makes perfect sense," says Winston. "Move."

Nick steps out of the way and they carry his desk out of his room.

"Why can't it be Jess's room instead?" he asks and he knows he's starting to sound more whiny than aggressive.

"Because nobody would ever believe a human woman willingly lives in this pit of despair," Schmidt says promptly on his way back into the room and Nick reluctantly makes a face conceding the point.

"Can't we pull another shenanigan?" Jess asks from beside him. "Like with the landlord? Just throw everything outside? Ooh, I have a stopwatch, we could do drills!"

"Yeah, and look how well that worked out," Winston says, grabbing one side of Nick's mattress. "Nick, get the other side of this."

Nick reluctantly lifts the mattress and helps turn it sideways so it can fit through the door of the bedroom and then the apartment, to where they lean it up against the hallway wall.

"Oh god, this is the best day of my life,” Schmidt says. “I feel cleaner already having that thing gone. The biohazard levels in this apartment just dropped by 90%." Nick's going to smack him, he swears to god he is.

Jess puts a hand on his arm.

"Hey," she says. "It'll be okay. I don't mind sharing closet space."

"I'm not sharing!" Nick says, his voice getting high on the end and he stomps away. Except he doesn't have a room anymore so there's no door to slam. He has to satisfy himself with slamming the door of the bathroom stall and it bounces back and almost hits him in the face.

==

Schmidt doesn’t even have the decency to wait twelve hours before moving into Nick’s room himself.

“This is _my room_!” Nick yells for the tenth time, standing in the doorway, hands on his hips.

“Yeah, yeah, yes, of course,” Schmidt says soothingly. “Of course it is. I’m just thinking about the investigation. My room is so small, it would look suspicious if I chose to live there instead of here.” He adjusts the angle of his suit rack and steps back to consider it. “Do you think the lighting works over here?” he asks.

“I’m going to kill you,” Nick says and stomps off.

==

So he sleeps on the couch. He already falls asleep out here pretty regularly and this way he’ll wake up if the Nancy Drew lady knocks and can shove his pillow under the couch, whatever whatever.

**Monday:**

Nick wakes up on the couch to what he thinks is a weed whacker -- he can't understand why there'd be a weed whacker outside their fourth floor window -- before he realizes it's the on-off-on sound of Schmidt pulsing the blender to crush ice.

Nick scrambles into an upright position, already yelling.

"Oh my god, what is wrong with you, stop stop stop," he says. Schmidt turns his head toward him, frowning, and pulses the blender one more time. He's already wearing a suit and tie, his briefcase on the corner of the kitchen island.

"It’s my Monday morning smoothie," he says like that should mean something to Nick and starts up the blender again. Nick slumps back down onto the couch and growls into the cushions.

-

**Tuesday:**

It's dark, it's very dark, it feels like he's only been asleep for like five minutes, and someone's whistling "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" And, from the smell, cooking something very onion-y. Nick pushes himself up on his elbows and squints at the kitchen.

“Winston??” he says and Winston’s head pops out.

“Oh, hey, sorry, man. Just getting home from work. Go back to sleep.”

Nick slumps back down and almost has when Winston comes over and settles down on the other end of the couch with his dinner.

“Hey, man, you don’t mind if I watch ESPN with the volume really low, do you?” Winston asks as he flips the TV on. “Don’t worry, I’ll be out of your hair before the sun comes up.”

-

**Wednesday:**

Wednesday night he’s ready to crash early, really early, so of course Schmidt has some stupid work project spread out all over the dining room table and the lights blazing and won’t stop muttering to himself and typing in furious bursts.

“How’s it going, Schmidty?” he calls from the couch for the fifth time, one arm flung over his eyes. It’s going on 1am and he knows he should feel sorry for the guy, but come _on_.

“Microsoft Excel is a motherfucker,” Schmidt answers, which seems to indicate he’s going to be a while.

-

**Thursday:**

He wakes up to Jess and Schmidt chattering away in the kitchen about (please let him be mishearing this) their favorite New Yorker articles. The teakettle is whistling and he hates that he knows it’s for Schmidt’s pourover coffee. (“It lets the coffee _bloom_ ,” he’d said, way too many times.)

Nick sits up, already so done with everything.

“Seriously, guys?” he says. “You’re seriously doing this right now.”

“What, um, morning?” Schmidt says. “Yeah, this is generally when it happens.”

"For the thousandth time, we have an air mattress, you can sleep on my floor," Jess offers over her mug of tea. Schmidt's phone does its insanely loud text message sound and Nick lets out a garbled groan. "Or just go crash in my bed now, I'm heading out." She hops off her chair and starts clattering dishes around in the sink.

Nick lets out a loud growl and stands up, bringing his blanket with him wrapped around his shoulders. He stomps down the hall and into Jess's room, where he flops face down onto her bedspread and sleeps for eight hours straight.

-

**Friday:**

He has to ask Schmidt at breakfast where the air mattress is and put up with Schmidt snarking at him for ten minutes about not knowing where anything is kept around the apartment. And then the machine they have to inflate it won’t work so he has to use that stupid frigging foot pump to blow the whole thing up, while Schmidt complains about the squeaking sound it makes until Nick is ready to wring his neck.

Nick doesn't get home from work until after 3am; thanks weekend drinkers. He knows everyone's going to be clattering around the apartment all morning tomorrow, doing their weekend crap, so he only hesitates outside Jess's door with the air mattress and his sleeping bag for like two or three minutes before he eases it open and starts wrestling the mattress inside. Maybe he should have done this part earlier. He can’t even crash in the small room because it’s already filled up with everyone else’s extra crap: a graveyard for Schmidt’s barbells and Jess’s half-finished sewing projects and empty shipping boxes everyone had been too lazy to take down to the recycling bin in the trash room.

Jess’s room is warm and dark and smells like sleep. She’s breathing deeply and evenly and only stirs when he shuts the door behind him.

"Nick?" she says blearily.

"Shhh," he says. "I'm just sleeping here."

"… okay," she says after a second and he eases the air mattress onto the floor at the foot of her bed and flops onto it, unzipping the sleeping bag and crawling into it as an afterthought. It feels so good to be horizontal, and on something other than a couch. His eyes are starting to adjust to the dim light and he lies still, listening as Jess shifts a little, her sheets rustling, the mattress letting out a tiny squeak.


	7. how to share a bed

They go two days without overlapping in her bedroom – at least not while awake. Nick comes home from work late, way after Jess is asleep, and when she gets up he’s still crashed on the air mattress, blankets tangled and one arm flung over his eyes against the sunlight.

It’s not ‘til the third day that they actually have to navigate this whole situation: almost bumping into each other in the doorway as he comes in from brushing his teeth while she’s on her way to do the same. They dance awkwardly around each other. Jess makes a face at herself in the bathroom mirror.

Back in the bedroom, Nick is sitting up on the air mattress, looking at his phone, and Jess realizes she needs to change into her pajamas.

“I’m just gonna—“ she grabs them from under her pillow and ducks into the closet to change, the corner where he can’t see her even though she’s left the door open, because let’s be honest, getting trapped in the closet again would be way worse than Nick accidentally seeing her kinda naked (again) and oh good god why is she thinking about this.

“Soooo…” she says when she’s finished changing, hovering in the door to her closet. “How’s it going, roomie?”

Nick’s lying down now, arms behind his head, and he turns it to give her a quizzical look.

“Good…” he says, frowning a little. Jess has a hand on either side of the closet doorway and drums her fingers on them a little.

“Cool, um, well, let me know if you need anything,” she says. “Um, roomwise. Bedroomwise.”

“Yeah, actually, I heard there was going to be fresh-squeezed juice here and a mint on my pillow?” Nick says. “And no one told me there’d be a weird girl living in the closet.”

“Shut up,” she says, laughing and heading for the bed.

“Can’t trust any Yelp reviews these days,” Nick says glumly and Jess laughs again and turns out the light.

==

Schmidt starts texting Nick at 4 on a Thursday about his company happy hour. Apparently he can hook Nick up with free drinks on the company tab. Probably. And Schmidt really needs him to show up. All his lady coworkers are talking about the Nuvaring and making fun of his pink shirt. Nick stays slumped on the couch and ignores as many texts as he can until Jess comes out of her room holding up her phone.

“Is Schmidt also using up your texting plan with a nervous breakdown slash promises to get you drunk?” she says.

==

He and Jess end up at a highboy in the corner of some aggressively dim bar near Schmidt’s office. Schmidt keeps swooping by with fresh drinks for them and loitering to bitch about office politics.

“Does she work with you too?” Nick asks, gesturing to a brunette in a short skirt who’s just sauntered by toward the bathroom. Schmidt glances over his shoulder to look.

“Does—no, Nicholas, no. Do not go near any of these female hydras.”

“Multi-headed water beasts?” Jess asks, but Schmidt ignores her.

“They will chew you up and spit you out. And then maybe chew you again. Like cud, Nick. Like cud.” He gestures toward the drink Nick is holding. “Especially now that you have a wedding ring on. Wedding rings are like catnip to the ladies.”

Nick frowns at him.

“What? That’s not a thing.”

“Oh, it most definitely is a thing,” Schmidt says. “My office is 93% women, I get to hear a lot of things. Dudes in wedding rings are aitch oh tee. Hot.” Nick rolls his eyes and glances over to Jess for support.

“No way,” he says, but Jess shrugs and gives a little nod like she hates to admit Schmidt is right. “What??” Nick says. “ _Really?_ That’s a thing for you?”

“Not just me!” she says. “I mean. Not me. I don’t know. It’s not my fault. I don’t go _after_ guys with rings! But when you see a guy is wearing one—” she shrugs again. “I don’t know. It’s like guys with babies.”

“Ha!” says Schmidt. “I can’t believe you didn’t know that. You’ve been wearing that around your bar for how long, and you haven’t been working that angle? Weaksauce, man, weaksauce.”

Nick glowers and is about to smack Schmidt upside the back of the head when Schmidt swears.

“Oh god, she’s looking over here, don’t make me talk to—Julie!” he says in a suddenly loud voice, plastering on a grin and abandoning them for some perfectly innocuous looking girl with blonde bangs.

==

They have had quite a few more than several drinks on Schmidt’s office tab by the time all is said and done, enough that they abandon their cars and Schmidt swipes at his phone and announces he’s called an Uber. It’s gotten dark and late somehow, but they all make it home in one piece. Schmidt collapses onto the couch and immediately starts frowning at his phone screen.

"Hoooo," Nick says, letting out a long breath and lifting his arm in a half-hearted wave. "'Night, Schmidty." Jess has already disappeared somewhere down the hall, weaving a little.

On his first try he goes into his old room, now Schmidt's room, and stands there blinking in confusion for several moments before he remembers why none of the stuff in here is his. On the second try he makes it into the bathroom, where he remembers how badly he needs to piss.

It's the third try when he makes it into Jess's room, which is already dark. He stands in the doorway, swaying just a little, as his eyes adjust to the dimness. Jess is already a lump under her covers and he shuts the door behind him and shuffles toward the pile of blankets on the floor that's his bed.

But when he flops down on the air mattress he hits hard floor instead.

"Fuck," he says out loud, followed by several other obscenities. So much for that patch job.

"What?" Jess mumbles from somewhere above him.

"Leak," he says shortly and lets out a growl as he tries to find a way to get comfortable. It's a losing battle and his back starts protesting loudly, right where he'd thrown it out during the football game all those months back.

After his third round of huffing and repositioning himself, the bed squeaks.

"Nick," says Jess’s voice from somewhere above him. "Stop. Just. Come here. Sleep here."

"No," he mutters, getting into a fight with the covers, which have somehow gotten all twisted. "I'm fine."

"You're not fine," says her exasperated voice. "And you're being so loud. Just come here so I can sleep. I'm so tired."

She sounds all plaintive and whiny and his back really is killing him but he pauses, hands still on the blankets. He's not too drunk to remember -- well.

"Are you--" he clears his throat. "Should we?"

There's a pause and he knows she's thinking about the same thing he is.

"Yes, it's fine," she says tiredly after a minute. Then, like she's trying to make one of them believe it: "It's fine, it's fine."

He's too tired and has had too much to drink to argue, not when the idea of an actual soft mattress sounds so amazing. Nick hauls himself upright and around the edge of the bed to collapse on the far side.

"There," says Jess, mumbling into her pillow. "See?"

And damn, this bed feels just as good as he expected. Even better. He feels awash with the pleasure of it. Lying down, soft pillows, dark room. Perfect.

"Thanks, honey," he mutters and feels himself sinking deliciously downward into sleep.

==

When he wakes up, Nick's head is throbbing and it's getting light and Jess has kicked off the covers so he can see that she's only wearing last night's shirt and her underwear. She must have kicked off her skirt on the way to collapsing in bed.

He looks for longer than he probably should before he realizes what's happening and squeezes his eyes shut again. After a minute he makes himself roll over so he's facing the other way and keep his eyes shut 'til he falls asleep again, definitely _not_ replaying the image of Jess’s bare legs or her cotton panties or her hair all tangled across the pillow.

Next time he wakes up the bed is empty and his head hurts marginally less and he would pay about ten katrillion Nick Bucks for the uncomplicated simplicity of having his own room again.

==

Jess pads into her bedroom in pajamas that night just in time to see Nick kick the deflated air mattress in its saggy gray side. Since he's also holding it in an awkward armful, it doesn't do much except make him stumble. She hears him mutter something muffled and realizes he's holding a wad of rolled over duct tape between his teeth.

"Rest in peace?" she asks, shutting the door behind her. Nick jumps when he hears her voice and turns around, spitting out the duct tape in the process.

"I found three new leaks," he says throwing the mattress sulkily onto the floor. "Stupid piece of foreign-made junk."

"I'll see about the funeral arrangements," she says as she climbs into bed.

Nick sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. He kicks the mattress again, this time more to get it out of the middle of the floor than as an expression of rage towards inanimate objects. It winds up shoved against the foot of her desk in a sad-looking heap.

"I'll get that tomorrow," he mutters, not looking at her, and starts shaking out the layers of bedding she thinks of as his nest. Jess picks her book up from the bed table and opens it to her bookmark, but she keeps watching him through the top of her glasses as he lays down his sleeping bag and sheet and blanket. He flicks off the overhead light, leaving just her reading lamp on, his movements routine, and a strange feeling -- deja vu and unexpected intimacy -- washes over her. She can't remember when they started going to bed at the same time on his nights off, but it’s so normal now she doesn’t even think about it.

Jess bites her lip as he drops to his knees, hitting the floor with a thud.

"Nick," she says after a moment. "Stop."

"What?" he says in his best irritated voice. His head pops up over the foot of her bed, hair somehow already super crazy from like three seconds lying down.

"Don't be a dummy," she says. "You don't have to sleep on the _actual floor_. You can come up here."

"I'm not a dummy," he says immediately and automatically, then frowns deeper as he processes what she said. "I'm fine," he says, shaking his head.

"You're not fine," she says, "it's going to be like the time you fell asleep on the living room floor and limped around like Igor for two days."

"That was only because Winston made me do shots and didn't put me to bed," he says. Jess ignores him.

"Yessss, maaaaster," she oozes in a rusty voice, hunching her shoulders and making claws with her hands.

"Jess…" Nick says in exasperation and she sighs and drops her hands. "You know it's not… we shouldn't."

Jess presses her lips together, looking at him. She tries not to think about this; if she doesn't think about it hard enough, it's almost like it never happened and if it never happened she doesn't have to think about what they didn’t talk about or why they didn’t talk about it.

"That… was different," she says carefully. His face has gone still and serious and she feels herself running her thumb back and forth over the edge of her book. "It was a rough time. For everyone."

Nick nods once, a small motion, almost to himself, and looks away.

"And last night was fine. We're human grownups. Pals." She shrugs. "NBD."

"Enn bee dee?" he says.

"… no big deal?" she says, knowing she's going to get an eye roll.

"Geez," he mutters and does indeed eye roll. But after a second he huffs out a sigh and hauls himself to his feet.

"Fine," he says. "Okay."

He hovers there awkwardly in his sweatpants and t-shirt, reaching up to scratch behind his ear.

"… okay," she says and he's still looking at her. She blinks at him.

"All right," he says.

Jess looks down at her book and pretends to be engrossed in it as he climbs into her bed. The mattress dips with the weight of his body and she keeps looking at her book as beside her Nick fluffs the pillow, adjusts the covers, settles down and goes still. She keeps the book propped on her knees while she looks at him from the corner of her eye, curled up on the far edge of the bed, his back to her and she doesn’t turn out the light and lie down herself until she thinks his asleep, his breathing gone slow and even and deep.

==

So they’re doing this. Jess wakes up in the night feeling the mattress shift as Nick climbs into bed next to her, and tiptoes around in the morning while he snores into her pillow.

It feels weird, kind of loaded-weird, and Jess worries what that means. But really, who wouldn’t feel weird in this kind of situation, right? Lots of circumstantial weirdness. It would actually be weirder _not_ to feel weird, so actually -- _actually_ \-- this is pretty normal. And the weird feelings will just go away when the stubbly, warm-blooded guy in her bed does.

==

Nick tends to wake up when he gets kicked in the shins. Like right now. He jerks awake (oh god, the sunlight is the color of _early_ ) and blinks at the other side of the bed. Jess is bent at the waist, hanging headfirst off the side (hence the kicking him, apparently), and for a second he thinks she's falling out. He sits up fast and reaches out to grab her around the waist without thinking, and Jess shrieks and jerks back upright, almost smacking him in the face with her head.

"What are you doing?!" she screeches, twisting around to look at him.

"What are _you_ doing?!" he bellows, full of adrenaline.

"Looking for my glasses!" she says.

"Trying to keep you from falling out of bed and hitting your damn head on the floor," he says at the same time.

"I thought you were asleep," she says, voice a bit gentler and he scrubs a hand over his face.

"I _was_ asleep 'til you started practically kicking me in the junk," he says back, also softer. It's really weird being this close to Jess this early after waking up. His mouth tastes like crap and her face is pale without any makeup and under the covers her knee is just barely touching his thigh.

"Your glasses?" he says with a sigh.

"I knocked them off the bed table," she says, frowning. "And now I can't see to find them."

Nick heaves a sigh, swings his legs over his side of the bed, and pads around to hers. The glasses are right there, half under the bed, and he didn't realize she was quite this blind without them. He bends over and grabs them.

"Here, Jess," he says, holding them out. She takes them from him and slips them on, blinking up at him.

"Vision!" she says, in a much perkier voice, and oh god, obviously he already knew she was a morning person, but he's not going to be able to handle this. "Thanks, Nick. Sorry about the kicking," she adds. "You're lucky though, I used to kick in my sleep all the time. Cece would always have these crazy leg bruises after our sleepovers and--"

She breaks off abruptly and giggles, looking away fast from his crotch and he glances down.

"Oh, come _on!_ " he says and she shrieks a little laugh and jumps out of bed, giving him a wide berth on the way to the door. "It's biological!" he yells after her. "You're just laughing at the human circulatory system!"

==

When she comes back in from brushing her teeth, he's sitting on the foot of the bed staring dazedly at the floor, too tired to figure out what to do next.

"What time did you get home?" she says, making a beeline for her closet.

"Two," he says. "Or three?" The weeknights blur together.

"Yeah, I think you're allowed to go back to sleep," she says over her shoulder. Her clock says 6:53 and he falls backwards onto the bed with a groan.

"Pink or green?" she says, holding up two dresses, and he lifts his head to peer at her.

"Um. Pink," he says, and she nods and puts the green one away. He feels weirdly powerful.

After a minute he hauls himself up the bed and back under the covers, flinging an arm over his eyes to keep out all this goddamn sunshine. He falls asleep that way, listening to her bustle around, humming under her breath.

==

He's actually a little weirded out by how quickly they adapt to this cohabitating situation.  Maybe it's because they've both lived with someone before.  The thought gives him a pang.  It brings back summers in college, sharing a room with Caroline, fighting and spending long sweaty afternoons making up (he always did love the making up with her).  Being kind of weirded out by girly underwear drying in the bathroom, trying to remember that maybe he shouldn't just belch indiscriminately because living with a girl was not the same as living with Schmidty.

It's stranger to think of Jess in her old life.  He's so used to her here, with her own room, doing her own thing.  Funny to remember that she lived with a dude (a mega, mega tool of a dude), slept in <i>their</i> room, in their bed.  And for a really, really long time.  (He can't figure that one out at all, because really, him?  <i>That</i> guy?)  But now that he thinks about it, he can totally see her having the kind of comfortable routines of long term relationships.  Laundry day and the same three things in the dinner rotation and sharing a shower without hanky panky and changing the sheets and lazy, routine sex on weekend mornings and oh dear god, why is he thinking about this?


	8. how to flirt in public

**THEN**

After the diagnosis and then the whirlwind of marriage license and paperwork and starting treatment, Nick’s doctors spent a few weeks poking and prodding at him, taking blood and generally being unhelpful and then they finally decided the best course of action was surgery. 

Jess was there, sitting in the exam room with him, notebook in her bag in case they got any info Nick wouldn’t be able to remember on his own. Something in Nick’s face went kind of blank when the doctor gave her opinion, and it took Jess a minute or two to realize this was just the kind of time to start taking notes.

They couldn’t tell definitively if the growth was malignant, said the doctor, so she wanted to operate, take it out, and then pursue an aggressive course of chemotherapy if it did turn out to be cancerous.

They left the hospital with a surgery date, fully scheduled, three weeks out. Nick didn’t say anything at all the whole ride home, and Jess knew she was talking way too much to fill the silence, but she couldn’t stop. 

“—really, though, I think this is so good,” she said as she pulled on the parking brake and cut the engine. “It’ll mean you just _know_ and it’s moving forward and it’ll all be … great.”

Nick finally looked over at her for the first time on the whole ride and Jess tried to veer her expression toward hopeful and away from terrified. She couldn’t even imagine how he must feel.

“Yeah, Jess, it’s good,” he says flatly and opens the car door. “Thanks for the ride.”

He disappeared into his room upstairs and didn’t come out until he had to head straight for work. Jess spent the evening sitting on the couch, going down terrible Google rabbit holes about thyroid cancer and trying in vain to think of something cheery and reassuring she could text Nick.

Nick got home late, extra late, the sound of his key turning in the door jolting Jess out of her doze on the couch. He was walking with the shuffling gait that meant he’d been drinking and didn’t look over toward her or the one lamp she still had on.

“Hey,” said Jess softly and his head jerked up, like he hadn’t realized she was there.

“Hey,” he said back and dropped his jacket on the hook by the door, heading straight toward his room. 

Jess waited to see if he would come back out but there wasn’t any noise, not even when she stood outside the door and listened carefully.

“Nick?” she whispered against the door, then knocked lightly so she wouldn’t wake Winston up.

There was no answer but he’d _just_ gone in there, so she bit her lip and carefully turned the handle.

“Nick?” she said again, and eased her way inside. It was dark, but with the light from the hallway she could see him on his bed, arm over his eyes.

“What is it, Jess?” he said tiredly without moving and she crossed the room to stand next to him.

“I wanted to see if you’re okay,” she said and there was a long, strained pause. Just when she thought he was going to completely ignore her he moved his arm and looked up at her.

"Jess," he said helplessly. "I want to make this stop. I don't know how to get it to stop."

"Oh Nick," she said and slid to sit onto the bed beside him. After a moment she reached out and slipped her hand into his, where it was resting on top of the covers. Her chest felt tight with helplessness; how badly she felt for him, how much she wanted to fix things.

Nick was watching her, eyebrows drawn together, face tight.

"It's going to be all right," she said, and his frown deepened.

"You don't know that," he said. "It's not all right right now."

Jess pressed her lips together and watched him swallow, eyes still on her face.

"I know," she said and squeezed his hand. "Right now-- right now it sucks butt." He snorted a little. "But I'm here for you. We're all here for you. And we're going to stick with you and figure it out and make things okay." She squeezed his hand again and he nodded slowly against the pillow.

Jess slid down until she was lying on her side facing him, hand still in his.

"What if I--" he started, then stopped and licked his lips. "What if I never _do_ anything? Grownup things? Get my shit together? What if I don't--" He stopped and the unspoken words hung in the air between them: what if I don't get the chance?

Jess sucked in her lower lip. He was looking at her like his life depended on it, like everything depended on it and all she wanted to do was take the helpless, heavy look off his face.

"Well," she said. "We'll figure that out too." He didn't say anything and she squeezed his hand again. "I promise," she said, and he closed his eyes and exhaled through his nose. After a moment he nodded, eyes still closed. "One challenge at a time, though, okay?" she said and he opened his eyes and nodded again.

"Yeah," he said, then pressed his face into his pillow. "You're too nice to me," he mumbled and she laughed softly, low in her throat.

"Yeah, probably," she said and he snorted into the pillow.

She meant to just stay there until he fell asleep, to wait until she was sure he wouldn't wake up and then disentangle her hand from his and tiptoe out and crawl into her own bed. She kept rehearsing it in her head with her eyes closed, right up until she wasn't awake anymore herself.

==

Nick woke up slowly, then all at once. Someone was in bed with him. Jess: eyes closed, facing him, her hand loose with sleep on the mattress beside his. Everything came back in a rush, then – his freakout, her comforting him – and he felt a pang of mortification. That old, familiar good-morning-Nick-Miller feeling. 

He’d never gotten to look at Jess like this: so close and unaware. Awake, Jess is always moving, even when she’s sitting in one place: biting her lip, pushing her glasses up her nose, darting her eyes between him and Schmidt and Winston, waiting to chime in. Asleep, she’s still and there was something strange and private about seeing her like this: her bangs stuck to her forehead, her mouth hanging a little open. 

She’s _pretty_ , so stupidly pretty and as if on cue, something surged through him, reminding him. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling. He used to brush it off as just the strangeness of having a girl live with them, be all up in their domestic routines. And then he got to know her and she wasn’t this random weirdo pretty girl, she was just—Jess. And that made the way she looked both more and less distracting.

He realized he was being a super creepo watching her like this and made himself blink and look away, up at the ceiling. He couldn’t remember anything he dreamed and he realized for the first time in ages he’d slept straight through without waking up all night.

Jess sighed a little, shifting in her sleep, and he felt a bolt of panic down his spine. What should he say if she woke up? When she went quiet again he took it as his chance and slipped out of bed. There were jeans and a hoodie flung on the back of his desk chair and he grabbed both on his way out the door, figuring if he was quick enough he could make it out of the whole apartment before she woke up and they had to have any awkward interactions. And lucky him, he did.

 

**NOW**

Fall creeps along and so does the investigation. Samantha comes and goes; she almost never lets them know when she'll be by and she has a lot of awkward questions: why are they still living with roommates? Why didn’t they take a honeymoon? How are their relationships with each others’ parents?

She marks things down on the stupid mini iPad thing she's always carrying around and makes faces that could mean almost anything. When she wanders, Jess dances around her trying overly hard to be helpful (opening the toilet stall door was probably a low) and Nick hovers two feet behind her, hands in his pockets, clenching his jaw at how casually she pokes through all their things. She slides open drawers in their bedroom ( _Jess's_ bedroom) looking at his boxers in the top drawer of his banged up old dresser, at Jess's rainbow of dresses in the closet.

==

There’s some kind of staff work party, for Jess’s job at the community college, and because he is a dumbass, Nick somehow let himself get talked into coming along. (“Please please please,” she’d said. “I hardly know any of the other teachers, but they’re making a big deal about showing up.” “Noooope,” he said. “Definitely not.” “It’s open bar,” she offered. “… yeah, okay, I’m in,” he said.)

The party is loud and boring and he doesn't know anyone and he’d estimate that together they've gone through at least a bottle's worth of wine. They’ve been critiquing the business casual (“teacher chic,” Jess says) choices of the other partygoers which then devolved into trying to pair people up based on approximately similar levels of attractiveness and somewhere along the way Jess started teasing him about his pickup skills. 

“Too bad you don’t have more game,” she says, swirling the rest of the wine in her glass. “You could talk some teacher hottie into taking you home.”

"What?!" he says indignantly. "I so have got game. You don't even know how much game I have."

"All right, fine," she says, crossing her arms and looking amused. "Prove it."

" _Prove_ it?" he says, raising his eyebrows.

"Yep," she says. "Show me your game. Pick me up. Work your charms."

She raises her chin, smirking, and Nick feels a surge of something dangerous in his gut. 

"Really?" he says, and his voice comes out low. He takes a step nearer, close enough that he's in her space and she has to tilt her head up to meet his gaze. "Well, I could always get a little closer. Look for an excuse to—oh, hold still.” He brushes his knuckle across her cheek, feeling the fleeting smoothness of her skin. “Eyelash.” He sees her smirk fading into something more serious, a little doubtful.

“But I don't know, Jess,” he goes on, without breaking eye contact. “It seems like it would kinda insult your intelligence to tell you exactly how much you'd enjoy me--" he puts a hand on the wall beside her head and hears her quick intake of breath. "-- or exactly how much I'd enjoy you--" this close he can see her swallow, hard, "-- when we both already know you'll be sleeping with me tonight."

Jess breathes in quickly again and licks her lips and he realizes he's staring at her mouth, staring at her mouth from six inches away. When he drags his gaze back up to hers she looks half stricken, staring at him, her eyes dark. He suddenly can't even remember why this seemed like it would be funny or fun.

Jess presses her lips together and lets out a tight little laugh and it breaks the spell enough for him to step back and clear his throat and glance away. Regain his composure.

"Okay fine," Jess says, making him look back at her. "Maybe you've got a little bit of game."

"Ha!" he says, pointing at her. "You admit it."

"Shut up, Miller," Jess says, and takes his glass out of his hand. "Another?"

"It's like you know me," he says, shooting her a cheesy grin and a wink, and she snorts and slips by him, heading for the bar.

When she's gone, Nick takes a deep breath and scrubs his hands over his face. What the hell, what the hellll, what is he doing. Okay, he’s gonna focus on drinking a little more slowly and … spending less time hanging around Jess? Yeah, sure. That’ll happen.

"Hey, look who it is!" says an oddly familiar voice behind Nick and he turns around. Oh lord.

"Genslinger," he says flatly.

"Nick!" Paul says, somehow getting Nick's hand in his own to shake it. "How-- how's it going, man?"

"Uh, good," Nick says, scratching the back of his head awkwardly as he tries to look for Jess without seeming like he's looking for Jess.

"So are you teaching classes here too, or…?” Paul says. “Wait, lemme guess, pre-law? I just picked up a class in the music depart--. Hold. The phone," he breaks off abruptly and Nick thinks he's spotted Jess first. It takes a second to realize Paul's looking at Nick's hand, the one he's just let drop from behind his head. "You're _married?_ Congratulations, dude! That's so. That's so fantastic."

Before Nick can stop him, Paul has somehow wrapped both arms around him in an overly enthusiastic hug.

"That is so _wonderful_!" he says pulling back. "Honestly, I really didn't think you were the marrying type."

Nick makes a face.

"What? What does that mean?"

"Oh, you know," Paul says and laughs. "You had the whole--" he does something claw like with his hands near his face. "Grrr."

"The whole… grr?" Nick repeats.

"The whole grumpy bear thing," Paul says like it's obvious, dropping his hands. He puts on a voice that Nick realizes after a moment is supposed to be him. "’I'm a gloomy gus, I don't like anyone.’"

"I like people!" Nick protests as Paul keeps talking.

"But this is so amazing," he says. "Who is she? Where'd you meet? How long have you two been together? You look great man, she must make you really happy."

Before Nick can even start to answer, Paul holds up his own hand.

"I don't know if you heard, but-- guilty, too," he says, pointing to his wedding ring. It's gold, Nick notices, which is as far as he's gotten in distinguishing wedding ring differences. He likes his better.

"It's our five month anniversary next week," Paul adds. "Oh man, I'm so glad we can connect on this. Isn't it great? Just knowing you're-- you're all set? You've found the right person?" His eyes are wide with enthusiasm and he hasn't stopped beaming at Nick this whole time. Wow, Nick really has not missed having him around.

"Gosh, sorry," Paul says. "I'm not letting you get a word in edgewise. I guess I'm just… I'm glad we each found our own happy ending. And now we can meet and talk without all that -- rrrr -- between us." He vibrates his hands in the air between them. Before Nick can ask what exactly _that_ means, Paul claps a hand on his shoulder.

"But seriously, man, tell me all about her. What's her name?"

"… Jess," blurts Nick, looking over Paul's shoulder, where Jess is standing as if on cue, holding both their drinks, eyes huge as she realizes who Nick is talking to.

Paul swivels his head to look and Nick can see each of the emotions that passes over his face in turn, then immediately wishes he hadn't.

" _Oh,_ " he says, in a voice of such understanding Nick can _feel_ his own frown getting deeper. "Oh, wow. I-- hi. Jess. Hi, Jess."

He takes a step back to turn towards her and Nick swoops in to grab one of the drinks out of Jess's hands, since she's looking like she might be a flight risk.

"Hi, Paul," Jess says in a small voice.

"Wow," Paul says again, and clears his throat. "Congratulations. Congratulations! I've gotta say," he adds, starting to smile again as he glances over at Nick and then back at Jess. "I'm not really that surprised. I knew there was something going on here."

Jess is just taking a sip of her wine and chokes a little as he says it. Nick pats her on the back while she coughs it out.

"You what?" Jess says as she comes out of the coughing fit, voice still strained.

"All that arguing," Paul says. "The sparks, the sexual tension, the shared living space." From the corner of his eye Nick sees Jess open her mouth then close it.

"But I'm glad-- I'm really glad you two finally figured it out." His voice gets warm and he sounds truly sincere as he says it. His sincerity. That's another thing Nick hated about him.

"Paul, it's not--" Jess starts. Paul holds up his hands.

"It's cool, it's cool," he says, "I get it, you don't have to explain anything to me. Besides, it really worked out. If we'd kept riding this train--" he points between himself and Jess. "I wouldn't have found Jenn. And you two wouldn't have gotten together either."

This whole thing is really spiraling out of control and Nick doesn't even have a hint of an escape plan in mind.

"Yup," he says vaguely instead. "Gotta get off that train sometime."

" _Oh!_ " Paul says, his face lighting up again. “You don’t know the news.” He pauses, looking back and forth between them to build up the moment. “We’re pregnant!” 

Nick has never understood how guys can get away with saying “we” there without getting punched in the throat by pregnant women.

"Oh," says Jess, her voice sounding a little strange. "Oh wow. Congratulations, really. That's amazing." 

"We're due in May!" Paul says and he's smiling so wide he might actually sprain something.

"Congrats," Nick mumbles, hating this moment more and more.

"Yeah, we're so pumped," Paul beams. "It just felt like, why wait, you know? Let's just go for it. Babies!" He laughs a little nervously. "What-- what about you guys, any big plans on that front?"

Maybe Nick's trying to get back at Jess for the earlier dig about his pickup skills or maybe he's just had enough of Paul and this suburban picket fence bullshit.

"Oh sure," he says, with a level of sarcasm he knows from experience Paul won't pick up on. "Loads of plans. Trying right now, actually. We can barely get out of bed." He claps an arm around Jess who stumbles a little, pressing into his side.

"Oh!" says Paul, looking like he wishes he hadn't asked. "Oh, you are?" Nick realizes he’s glancing at Jess’s glass of wine. She notices too.

"Fruit juice, of course!" she trills, wagging it at him, in a voice he'd know as fake even if he were in a coma. Paul laughs politely.

"Right, right," says Paul and all three of them settle into an uneasy silence. Nick is definitely _not_ thinking about trying to get Jess pregnant and oh god, what if that's what the other two are thinking about. 

"ANYWAY," he says loudly to break the silence and they both stares at him. He should probably have figured out what to say next. "We, uh. We have to go." Beside him Jess starts nodding in agreement and it only takes five more minutes of pleasantries before they actually manage to extricate themselves.

Outside she’s quiet and he is too. He wants to laugh about it with her, brush the whole thing off as hilarious and stupid, but it felt so—real. And weird. And she must feel the same way because she keeps not looking at him and when the back of their hands brush on the way to the car she jumps and twitches away.

“So, that was –“ he starts as they get close to her car.

“Yeah,” she says quickly and laughs nervously. 

“—crazy,” he says and she nods fast. 

“Yeah, yes, crazy.”

They’ve paused near her car and Jess looks down at the ground, carefully scuffing her toe along a crack in the cement. 

"Want me to drive?" he asks and she lifts her head to look at him.

"What?" she says. "Oh yeah, you probably better." She fishes in her coat pocket for her car keys and hands them over.

In the car she curls up in the passenger seat, leaning her head against the window and humming under her breath. He wonders what she's thinking. The whole conversation keeps going in circles through his head as he drives and he doesn't know why and he doesn't like any of the paths it's leading him down.

“I can’t believe you said we can barely get out of bed!” Jess suddenly yelps, sitting up straight like she just remembered. Her eyes are so wide and indignant that he starts laughing.

“Nick!” she says, smacking him in the arm. “It’s not funny! It’s gross! Now he’s going to be …. _thinking_ about it.” She shudders.

“That’s for saying I don’t have game!” he says.

Jess shakes her head, laying her head back against the window.

“So wrong,” she says and he turns the steering wheel towards home.


	9. how to prep for surgery

**THEN**

The night before his surgery they stayed up late: Jess had the remote and she picked The Daily Show, then Colbert, then Conan. They both had to be up early early tomorrow to go to the hospital but neither of them said anything.

Jess knew she should go to bed but she hated to think about Nick out here alone, the tv flickering, all in his own head with that gloomy gloomy face. He kept shifting on his end of the couch without saying anything and finally she reached for the remote and turned the tv off.

The room felt abruptly dark and quiet and it took a minute for her eyes to adjust. When she looked over at Nick he was watching her and she knew what he wanted. He swallowed hard.

"Will--"

"Yes," she said quickly and he huffed out a breath and gave her a smile that made her heart twist: something relieved and terrified and pleased and sad.

She waited in her room 'til she heard him finish brushing his teeth and close his door. The apartment was dark when she slipped out of her room and across the hall.

Nick's light was off when she shut his door behind her, but he shifted over in bed to make room for her. His bed smelled the same, felt the same as the last time she was here: Old Spice deodorant and sheets washed to threadbare softness.

Jess curled up facing him, her knees drawn up between them, and after a moment felt Nick's hand come to rest on one. It was too dark to fully make out his expression but she could feel the tension radiating from him, his breathing quick and shallow. She slipped her hand under the covers and rested it on top of his, squeezing it lightly.

"You okay?" she said in a whisper and after a moment she felt his hand squeeze her knee in response.

"Yeah," he said finally, like he wasn't quite sure he believed it. "I'm gonna be okay."

She squeezed his hand again and he brushed a thumb across her kneecap, shifting on his side of the bed. Jess adjusted the pillow she was using, eyelids heavy with sleepiness, but Nick was restless, shifting again on his side of the bed. Even with eyes closed she could feel the nervous energy coming off him and she forced her eyes open so she could see his face in the dim room.

He wasn’t looking at her, staring blankly instead at a spot on the blanket near her shoulder. His thumb was still moving idly across her knee, where it was pulled up almost to her chest between them, and after a moment his hand slipped down, sliding over her calf in pajamas, to wrap around her bare ankle.

He looked up at her then and Jess felt something dip in her stomach. Something had shifted in Nick’s expression; his eyes flicked down and she realized he was looking at her lips and without thinking she dropped her eyes to his. When she looked back up he was watching her, something in his face intent and purposeful and she just had time for a jolt of electricity up her spine before he leaned in and kissed her.

Nick kissing her in his bed (oh god in his _bed_ ) was nothing like kissing him at the wedding had been. This kiss was hard and wet, his mouth open, his hand tightening around her ankle as he pressed into her, like he couldn’t get close enough and that’s why he was licking into her mouth, that’s why he was slipping a knee between hers, ever so slightly.

And like she’d been waiting for this all along, Jess realized she was kissing him back, almost as hard, her own arm going around his back to tangle in the soft, soft fabric of his t-shirt, her own mouth open and her back arching so she could press closer against him.

It felt like she could probably kiss him forever without her rational brain kicking in, like some part of her had already made this decision; had already said _yes_.

Nick pulled away first, breathing hard, then dropped one more quick kiss on her mouth, fast and sweet. Jess found herself straining forward, chasing his mouth as he pulled away.

She could hear – feel – Nick breathing hard, and barely make out his face in the dimness.

“… Nick?” she said after a moment in a tiny voice and he shook his head just a little.

“Shh,” he said and this time he moved in slowly so she saw him coming, turning his head to fit his mouth against hers.

Jess let out an embarrassing noise, a whimper bubbling up from some place inside of her that was apparently really, really into Nick Miller kissing her.

And dear god, could he kiss: Nick, her pal, her roomie, was somehow also this – _guy_ – solid and sure, sweeping his tongue across hers like kissing her was the most important thing he’d ever done, catching her lip in his teeth like he’d been practicing his whole life.

Jess was dizzy with airlessness and adrenaline by the time he stopped, her hands tingling with it.

She thought: he’s doing this because he’s freaked out and I’m here.

She thought: is he?

Her thoughts were sluggish, thick -- _Nick kissed me, **Nick kissed me**_ \-- seemed to be playing on a loop and then she realized they’d shifted, so she was almost lying on her back and Nick was propped up over her, with an expression she had no idea how to read.

Without thinking, Jess reached up to touch his face, sliding her palm across the bristles of his jaw. Nick’s eyelids flickered, then closed, and he turned his head just a little, toward her hand, pressing his face into it. Jess sucked in a breath and lifted her head to kiss him. Only barely, her lips closed against his, her hand still on his face, and when she let her head fall back down to the pillow, Nick’s eyes were still closed and whatever she’d expected it wasn’t this look on his face, so pained.

“Jess,” he said without moving. Under her hand she could feel a muscle jumping in his jaw, like he was clenching his teeth, and then he rolled away, off of her, his face slipping out of her hand.

Jess took several deep breaths, trying to get her pulse under control, waiting for him to say something else. When he didn’t, she looked over at his side of the bed. Nick was staring up at the ceiling, eyes wide, not looking at her.

“Nick?” she whispered and the muscle in his jaw jumped again. Instead of answering he glanced at her quickly, then slid his hand on top of hers, squeezing once, not looking at her. In the silence she could hear his breathing, quick and ragged, and her brain had shorted out to something blank and white and shocked. She was going to wait for him to say something because she couldn’t formulate a question right now if her life depended on it.

==

Jess woke up with the feeling that something huge had happened, and it hit her with a double blow before she opened her eyes. Nick had kissed her. Nick’s surgery was today.

When she opened her eyes she was alone, curled up in Nick’s bed, and she couldn’t believe she’d fallen asleep waiting for him to say something. Even if it had been the middle of the night in a dark room, on his stupid soft, soft sheets.

She sat up and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She could deal with all this scary hospital stuff or she could (maybe) process her dude roommate swooping in and kissing her into complete dumbfounded shock. She didn’t know how she was supposed to handle both.

==

Nick was MIA when she left his room, and then he was in the shower but only while Schmidt was also in the bathroom, tweezing his eyebrows, and then Winston was reminding them all they needed to hurry up and she just needed a second _alone_ , alone with him, to figure out what the hell had just happened, but he managed somehow to avoid her altogether.

And then they were in the car, heading to the hospital and then they were parking and then they were walking in and he wouldn’t meet her eye and she was running out of time but she didn’t even know if she meant running out of time to talk to him about last night or running out of time before they took him back to start the pre-op routine.

And then it didn’t matter anymore because the nurse called his name and he disappeared after her, shoulders hunched and hands in his pockets.

==

His whole time in the hospital is a blur of feeling shitty and doped up and scared and hurting like hell, in various combinations. Time got kinda fuzzy in there, especially since nurses kept coming in and waking him up in the middle of the night for stupid reasons.

He remembers Schmidt crying when they let him visit and Winston stealing all Nick's jello and Jess and Cece contributing some truly terrible mylar balloons to his room that bobbed near the ceiling and greeted him with their hideousness every time he woke back up.

And waking up to see Jess curled up in a chair next to the bed, sound asleep with her head on her arms. She looked small and tired, her hair all crazy, like she'd been there for a long time.

He remembers her face when he said her name and she woke up.

 

**NOW**

She doesn’t think about kissing Nick. Or—she doesn’t think that often about kissing Nick. It happened, yeah, and it feels super, super weird that they’ve never really talked about it. But it was a weird time; she knows that. She was freaking out, he was freaking out. They were in bed, it was late. (Probably half her bad makeout decisions in life are because it was late.)

And then Nick had his surgery so they couldn’t talk about it; and then he was in the hospital and pretty drugged up so it was definitely not a good time to talk about it; and _then_ he was home but still on painkillers for a little while; and then they got the all-clear news and _that_ was awesome and distracting.

And then it was summer and she tried, she really did, but she’s still not sure how to say oh, hey, remember that time we kind of made out when we were really freaked out about some super shitty grownup stuff and it was the middle of the night and you were maybe almost crying – can we discuss?

And Nick gets so weird about things. She doesn’t want him to be weird about this, or for stuff to get awkward between them. She wants to keep drinking beer on the roof with him and the guys, arguing about which Star Wars movie is the best. She wants to drag him along to the bookstore at The Grove. She wants to be a bro, to be cool. For things to be good.

But it _is_ a little harder not to think about lately, if she’s being honest. It’s probably just the situation. There’s the sleeping together thing, the acting like they’re married thing. The _being_ married thing.

… so yeah, okay, maybe she thinks about it sometimes. Wonders why it happened. Maybe – sometimes – a little – mostly only if she’s been drinking – wonders if it’ll happen again.

She wishes she knew if Nick ever thinks about it too. If bringing it up would be super out of left field. Probably. Maybe. Who can ever tell with him.

==

Jess is slumped on the couch when Nick gets home, face-deep in a container of ice cream.

"I saw Sam," she says before he even asks. Nick finishes hanging up his coat.

"The sunshine man," he says and Jess looks up at him, spoon in her mouth. "… Sam, Sam, the sunshine man?" he says. She furrows her brow and he sighs. "Never mind. What happened?"

"He wants to get back together," she blurts. Nick feels something leaden slide into place in his stomach, like it was just ready and waiting.

"Yeah," he says. "That makes sense. You're the one who got away." For every guy she's been with, he's sure. He moves around the couch to sit down on the other section. "What happened?"

"He wanted to get back together," she repeats and stares down into her tub of ice cream. "He said he missed me. He said he screwed up.” She pauses. “I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say yes so much." Her voice almost breaks and he waits without saying anything for her to go own. "I told him I got married.” She looks up at him. “I had the ring. He believed me."

"I made out with a stripper," he says. Jess’s sad face turns into a frown.

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"I made out with a stripper," he says again, "and she was awesome and hot. And then she punched me."

"What, why?"

"She saw the wedding ring," he shrugs. "And she didn't believe me when I said it was fake."

Jess laughs, throaty and warm and he smiles back at her in relief.

"I'm sorry," she says, smiling at him. "That sounds awful."

He starts laughing too.

"It was pretty awful," he says. "I think I deserve some sympathy."

"Hey," she says, laughing again, and pushes his knee with her sock foot. "I'm supposed to be the one getting sympathy here."

"You already have ice cream!" he says. "You think you deserve ice cream _and_ sympathy?"

"Yes!" she says, and he grabs her ankle, his fingers against the bare skin under her pajama pants.

"Come on, girl," he says. "Let's get you to bed."

==

He's almost asleep when he hears a small sound, then another. It takes him a minute to realize Jess is crying, very quietly, facing away from him on the far edge of the bed. She's clearly trying hard not to be heard -- all that lets him know are the soft, shuddery breaths she's letting out -- and he knows if he weren't here she'd have the privacy to cry alone as much as she wants. He should pretend he hasn't heard and let her have her dignity.

But he's never been any good at seeing Jess sad.

"Hey," he says in a whisper, and she goes quiet. There's a long pause, long enough that he thinks she might actually just pretend not to have heard him.

"Go back to sleep, Nick," she finally says, her voice thick and teary.

"Sam?" he says.

She's still another minute, then nods against the pillow, where he can barely see the outline of her head in the dark.

"What if I just -- never manage to find anyone I can make it work with?" she whispers after a minute, then sniffles hard, the sound loud and wet in contrast.

"C'mere," he says, and reaches for her shoulder. She stiffens for a moment and then turns over and curls into him all at once, her whole body going from rigid to loose. He brings a hand up to her back and hears her start to cry again, a little less quietly. Through her pajamas he can feel the ridge of her spine and the way her whole body shakes as she cries.

He hates when people try to shush you when you're crying, so instead he just rubs a thumb across her shoulder blades and pulls her in closer so her head is tucked under his chin.

"There's no way that's true," he says after a minute. “Don’t get all upset over these jokers.”

She lets out a weary little laugh against him that he can feel as much as hear. After a minute she inhales like she's going to say something and he braces himself for her to bring up Sam, talk about what she misses. But after a minute she lets out the breath and doesn't say anything after all. Just stays curled against him 'til her breathing evens out and he can tell from the small twitches in her hands that she's falling asleep.

He knows he should roll her back to her side of the bed. Keep things from being awkward. Try to not be a pervert. But he keeps not doing it and so she stays against him, warm and soft, comfortable like he hasn't felt in a long, long time. Since Caroline, since Julia, since almost ever.

==

In the morning, she's her normal self, singing some dumb song in the kitchen about breakfast foods, while Schmidt looks at his iPad and ignores her. When she sees him her song falters for a minute but she gives him a small, tight smile and picks up the song again, turning away to put the kettle on the stove.

 

**THEN**

Turned out, Nick doped up on post-op pain meds was not the greatest conversationalist in the world. He had a tendency to trail off mid-conversation and forget they’d been talking at all. On the upside though, he thought she was way funnier than he normally did.

They all took turns hanging out in the room with him during regular visiting hours, but Jess was the only one who could stay after, so she did. Mostly she and Nick watched tv or, when he was a little more clearheaded, played gin rummy on his bed until it got late and the nurses kicked her out.

==

There was a day at the hospital – a while after all this had started but before he’d gone under the knife – when Nick had come back out into the waiting room after another interminable round of blood draws with the phlebotomist who seemed to hate him specifically. Jess looked up from her magazine and started rummaging in her bag.

"Hey!" she said, emerging with a granola bar and a chocolate milk to hand him. "How'd it go?"

He took the snacks but then he just stood there and stared at them. She’d handed them to him so easily, hadn’t asked if he’d wanted them, had just known he’d be hungry, had known what he liked.

“Why’d you give me these?” he said instead of answering her.

“Because I… thought you’d be hungry?” she said, giving him the side eye.

“And you just had dairy sitting out here getting warm?” he said. He was being mean and he knew it but there was panic rising in his chest.

“Um, calm down Louis Pasteur,” Jess said, “I just got it from the vending machine ten minutes ago. But I’ll drink it if you don’t want it.”

She reached over to take it but he turned away.

“No!” he said, a little too forcefully. “I—I want it. I’ll drink it.”

She gave him a strange look, but gathered her stuff without saying anything else.

He'd watched her driving the whole way home; her hair blowing in her face, the stereo playing the mix CD he'd made when she was complaining about her boring commute.

"Oh!" she said and turned up the volume as Adele came on, starting to sing along. She glanced over at him, caught him looking.

"… what?" she said.

“Nothing,” he said quickly. “I’ve just never heard Someone Like You given quite that interpretation before.”

She laughed and shook her head.

“You’re such a dick sometimes,” she said pleasantly and Nick turned away, looking out the window, at the freeway and the traffic, at anything but her.


	10. how to celebrate

**NOW**

It’s a Tuesday night and Winston and Jess showed up during happy hour to keep him company when things got slow. Winston headed out after one drink but Jess is still there, grading papers while Nick dries glasses and makes fun of the titles on the stories he can see.

“Yo,” Nick says to Big Bob, who’s off tonight but came by to pick up his paycheck. Big Bob pauses and points at Nick like he’s just remembered something.

“I forgot to tell you,” he says, ducking back behind the bar. "Some lady was in here looking for you. Samantha?" Nick's heart sinks and he shoots a meaningful glance at Jess. "She said she was Jess’s friend,” Bob says, turning to her. “Hey, Jess.”

“Hey, Bob,” Jess says.

“She wanted to know all about how long you two have been together," Bob goes on. Nick winces and opens his mouth.

"I can't believe you didn't tell us you got married, man!" Bob says, clapping him on the shoulder. "We all knew you’d been crushing on her for ages, I didn't know you sealed the deal! Way to go!" He holds up his fist for Nick to bump. Nick stares at him for a long, silent minute but Bob doesn’t waver so he finally has to give in and fist bump him back.

"Congratulations," Bob says a little more formally to Jess. "Nick's a great guy. Totally into you. Really excellent mojitos."

He claps Nick on the back and heads toward the office. Nick coughs and Jess looks intently at the bar top.

"… sorry about that," he says awkwardly. "Big Bob mixes some of his coworkers up sometimes, he must have thought--"

"Oh, yeah, no," Jess says in a rush. "Of course." She gives him a tight smile and he clears his throat, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

"I gotta check on the--"

"Yeah, definitely," she says and starts looking at her phone really intently.

==

And of course now that Bob knows, soon all the bar regulars know. Which is okay with some of them: sure, he'll take a "congrats, man," along with that bigger-than-usual tip, thank you very much.

Others, not so much. Like Cream Sherry Greta, who spots Jess one evening and insists Nick introduce her to his lovely bride.

"Well, enjoy the newlywed phase," she says, winking at Jess. "I'm surprised you can walk straight, darlin'."

Jess's eyes get huge and Nick has to turn the choking noise he makes into a cough.

"Just remember to stay hydrated," Greta says, pointing to each of them in turn and winking again. "It's a marathon, not a sprint."

When she's gone, Jess turns to him, eyes as big as his feel.

"Oh my god," she says and then they're both laughing hard into their hands.

"Wow," Nick says. "Just... wow."

"That was..."

"... special," he finishes for her. "Let's never talk about it again."

"I'll second that motion," she says and they shake on it.

It's hard to get that conversation out of his head, though. It pops back up at really inopportune times, and he finds himself avoiding her eyes for the rest of the evening. She's clearly a little weirded out too, which he realizes after the third time she puts her hair up in a ponytail and then immediately takes it down. At least Greta didn't make any of her infamous blowjob jokes. He _really_ wouldn't be able to look at Jess then.

==

The thing about not having his own room—well, the thing about not having his own room is the lack of privacy for certain adult activities he’s never had to think about scheduling. Nick has started taking longer showers as a matter of habit, sliding a soapy hand down to jerk off quickly, mindas blank as possible, because he doesn’t know when he’ll have his next chance. And the last thing he needs these days is an untimely hard-on or one of his once-a-year wet dreams.

Has he always jerked off this much? Or is it his body’s response to spending every night sleeping next to someone he can’t touch? He can’t even remember.

There’s one morning, after Jess is gone, when he finds himself with his hand down his boxers before he’s even fully awake. He’s pretty sure he heard Jess leave for work already and he’s so hard he must have been having some kind of filthy dream. He can just remember the edges of it when he tries and he curls up on his side with his back toward the door, dick in his fist, and moves his hand fast.

He comes hard into a wad of Kleenex, gasping into the pillow on Jess’s bed. As moments go, it’s not one of his proudest.

 

**THEN**

The doctor’s call came the day after he got discharged from the hospital. Nick was the only one home and he almost didn’t answer his phone because he could tell from the number it was another call from the hospital. He’d started letting most of them go to voicemail: it was faster to just listen later and write down the appointment reminder.

When he hung up the phone, all the air in the empty apartment seemed charged. Different. He couldn’t believe there was no one home to tell. He circled the apartment, ran his hands through his hair, started to go outside, changed his mind and came back.

When Winston finally got home, Nick was sitting on the couch watching the door, the tv off.

“Yo,” said Winston, then paused and looked more closely at him. “You okay, man?”

“I’m free,” Nick said. “I mean, I’m clear. The doctor called. I’m okay. I’m all healthy. It wasn’t cancer. I’m good.”

Winston stared for a second longer, then dropped his bag on the floor and strode straight toward Nick, bear hugging him to the edge of comfort.

“I knew it,” he said, and he was beaming when he pulled back. “I knew you’d make it, man. You’re a fighter.”

“Well, I never actually had cancer after all,” Nick said, feeling a little uncomfortable.

“Shut up, Nick,” Winston said, still grinning, and hugged him again.

They were clinking the necks of their Heislers together over the kitchen island when Schmidt got home. He immediately launched into a diatribe about inappropriate use of reply-all at the office while he slung his messenger bag over the back of a chair, stepped out of his loafers and started unbuttoning his shirt. Nick and Winston both watched him silently until he noticed and trailed off.

“… what?” he said, touching his hair self-consciously, and Nick got to break the news again.

Schmidt, of course, launched himself at Nick’s face, grabbing him for a hard, wet kiss. Nick jerked away and swiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, but he could tell his glare wasn’t convincing.

“Hey hey, no crying,” he said, looking at Schmidt’s face. “Come on, man, grab a drink, we’re celebrating.”

Jess came home last and yeah, okay, maybe he’d been listening for the door for the last half hour so he heard it right away. When he turned to look, she was stopped in her tracks, clearly able to tell something was up.

“Jesssss!” Winston shouted, lifting his beer bottle.

“Hey guys,” she said, setting down her bags and coming over. “Happy… Tuesday?”

He’d wanted to draw out the moment, to savor it, but he couldn’t.

“No cancer,” he said, gesturing at himself with the hand that wasn’t holding a drink. “All clear.”

Jess stared at him for a long moment, eyes huge, and for a weird moment it felt like it was just the two of them alone in the room.

“Oh my god,” she said with a noise that was half-laugh, half-sob and launched herself at him too, hugging him hard.

It was the first time they’d significantly touched since that night in bed and he only froze for a moment before he hugged her back. She pressed her face into his shoulder for a long moment and when she stepped back she was smiley and teary at once.

“Someone get me a drink,” she said, grinning at all three of them, and they toasted his health again, Schmidt whooping and Jess giggling and Winston smiling and shaking his head at both of them.

==

It was a different drunk than the kind he'd had lately. Every drink made him feel looser, warmer. The kind where he couldn't stop laughing at everything Winston said and didn't even yell at Schmidt for breaking out his Single Ladies dance routine. ("Timely," Cece said dryly.) The kind where maybe he ended up dancing on the coffee table too (NOT to a four-year-old Beyoncé song, thank you very much) shouting "Fuck you, cancer!" while everyone whooped.

Eventually Schmidt was slumped over at the dining room table, chin on his arms, staring at the label on his beer bottle and Winston was in the kitchen making something that smelled like it was probably Nick's box of Bagel Bites. Jess had been in the corner giggling with Cece, the two of them doing the drunk girl thing where they leaned in so their heads were almost touching and grabbed each other's hands a lot. But Cece went to the bathroom and Jess came over and flopped down beside Nick on the couch just like he'd been half-hoping she would.

"Jess-ic-a!" Nick said, and he still couldn't stop smiling. He slung an arm around her shoulders and she gave him a smile and leaned into him.

"So, pretty good day, huh?" she said, trying to look casual, but they were the same; she couldn't stop smiling either.

"Not the worst," he said. "Not. The. Worst." For the first time in so long he felt almost -- good when he thought about the future. Optimistic about his life and shit.

"I'm going to miss all those hospital gowns, though," Jess said and Nick groaned and put his other hand over his face.

"Who the hell invented those damn things?!" he said. "They're like assless chaps without the … chaps." She was laughing again, all husky and warm, and he felt himself starting to laugh too.

"What will I do without all those accidental flashings?" Jess said, still chuckling. "Nick Miller's butt, now appearing in a hospital room near you."

"Yeah, well," he said, dropping his hand. "You're just going to have to get used to living without that glorious experience."

She kept grinning at him and he realized his arm was still around her and oh, hey, apparently his fingers were tracing circles on her upper arm and he couldn't even picture what all this bullshit would have been like without her there, being all up in his space the whole way through.

"Well," he said. "I guess life doesn't suck as much as maybe I thought."

"Ah-ha!" Jess said, poking his chest with a finger, and she was beaming now. "You mean to say that maybe I'm right and the world isn't completely awful?!"

"Hey hey, I wouldn't go that far," he said. "Just, you know. Thanks for all your help, Mrs. Miller."

It sounded crazy the second he said it and he heard Jess breathe in suddenly, her smile faltering. But she kept looking at him, eyes on his face.

Nick felt his own face going serious too and his fingers went still where they were toying with the soft sleeve of her t-shirt. There was a long moment where she was just staring at him and he couldn't think of anything to say to make it seem like the joke it was supposed to be, just the last thing he said echoing over and over in his head. And – was Jess looking at his lips? Just like that, all he could remember was what her mouth had felt like, soft and warm, opening under his.

– and then Cece bounced back in from the bathroom saying something about Rihanna and dance parties and Jess cleared her throat and looked away fast and then got up to help Cece plug her iPod into the speakers and Nick let out his breath in a huff and swung himself off the couch and went to the kitchen like he wanted to see if Winston had set anything on fire yet.

 

**NOW**

Nick gets handsy when he's drunk – especially when he’s been drinking whiskey, which Jess probably should have thought of before making a bottle of Jim Beam the King of the Castle in tonight's game of True American. Winston and Nick's team won ("'Murika!" Winston shouted, holding the bottle over his head), which left Jess and Schmidt doing half-hearted, tipsy cleanup while Nick and Winston sat on the couch swigging out of their prize.

Jess gives up when Nick and Schmidt get into an argument that devolves into throwing empty beer cans at each other across the apartment.

"Hey hey hey!" she shouts, ducking a crumpled PBR can that almost comes down on her head. She puts on her best teacher's voice and points at the couch. "You. And you. Bedtime."

Nick scowls hard and Winston starts protesting that he's not part of this, but they both stand up and start shuffling towards the hall.

“You,” Jess turns to Schmidt. He gives her his sullen puppy dog eyes, holding a plastic trash bag with yellow-gloved hands. “I don’t suppose you’ll be able to sleep if we leave things like this, will you?” He shakes his head. “Fine,” she sighs. “Just … leave me some of it to do in the morning.”

She collapses onto the couch, one arm over her eyes, and listens to Schmidt finish filling the bag with empties and dump it in the hall. She feels like she’s swaying or spinning and groans a little as she hauls herself upright.

“Night, comrade,” she says to Schmidt, who’s in the middle of his post-booze, pre-bed water-chugging ritual in the kitchen. He gives her a thumbs up without pausing.

Jess brushes her teeth slowly and takes off her bra on the way to her room, pulling it out through a sleeve and tossing it in her hamper as she shuts the door behind her. The room’s dark and Nick’s not making any noise so she’s guessing he’s asleep. She changes fast, her back to the bed, pulling her dress off over her head before stepping into her pajama pants and pulling on the top.

“Hey, you,” Nick says when she turns back around and she almost jumps out of her skin.

“I thought you were asleep,” she hisses, blushing in the dark, wondering what he’d seen.

“Nnnnope,” he says and she realizes he’s still pretty drunk. Not that she’s entirely sober herself.

“Move over,” she says when she climbs into bed and realizes he’s sprawled across the middle of it.

“Sorry sorry,” he mutters, shifting backwards like two inches. Jess groans and shoves at him and he catches her wrist in his hand. He runs a thumb over the inside, then up to press into her palm. “Sorry about the throwing,” he says. “With the cans.”

“Already forgotten,” she says, because she had. She carefully pulls her hand out of his grasp and turns over so she’s facing away from him.

But his hand is back a minute later, skimming over her hip and leg, then back up to her hand where it’s resting in front of her on the bed. The mattress dips and she feels Nick shift closer, so his front is just brushing against her back. She doesn’t say anything and he moves forward a little more to curl around her, spooning her like it’s something they do every day.

“Hey,” she says carefully after a minute, because she’s the more sober person. She should stop this. “Whatcha doing, handsy?” She lifts his hand off her and tries to shift away but he pulls her back toward him.

“Don’t,” he says into her hair. “Just.” There’s a long pause and she wonders if there’s going to be any more to that sentence. “That was fun,” he says instead after a minute. “Fun game. How are you always so fun, honey?”

Jess feels her stomach flip a little. She doesn’t say anything and Nick twines his fingers with hers and goes still, slipping almost immediately into the slow breathing she already associates with sleeping Nick.

Jess waits a few minutes before cautiously lifting his arm off her and trying to scoot away one last time. She should get points for that, at least, right? But Nick makes a wordless, irritated noise and pulls her back toward him, arm tightening around her again and she gives up. Lets it feel good.

==

“So,” says Samantha, where she’s sitting across the kitchen table from Nick. Jess is in the kitchen making another mug of tea for her and totally eavesdropping. “Let’s talk about eloping. How was that?”

The tricksy thing about Samantha, to use Jess’s term, is that you forget she’s trying to sneak information out of you, ‘cause she acts like it’s just a casual thing to be chatting about.

“Um,” he says. “Uh, I mean. Good? It was good.” From the corner of his eye he can see Jess has turned her head to watch him and he sits up a little straighter. “It was nice,” he says in a firmer voice. “We went with our friends. Saved money on a big wedding.”

Jess comes back to the table and sets Samantha’s tea in front of her before sitting back down next to Nick.

“It was fun,” she adds in her Helpful Voice. “Just the five of us.”

“But why so fast?” says Samantha. “You understand why this raises some red flags, given the timing. Nick?”

Nick looks down at the table to take a breath, then back up at Samantha.

“It felt… right,” he says. “Sometimes it’s just—exciting to realize how well you click with someone.”

He can feel Jess turn her head to look at him. She knew the answer to this question from their flashcards and that wasn’t it.

“Plus we’ve both recently had long term relationships end and we’re in our thirties now and ready to settle down,” he says in a rush, their actual practiced answer.

“Mm,” Samantha says, her standard response, and looks back down at her list of questions.

“And Jess, can you tell me what Nick wore?”

“You wore your brown suit,” Jess says promptly, glancing over at him. “The one with the vest, from when we went to that wedding. … our first date,” she adds only a second belatedly.

“And Nick?” says Samantha. “Same question.”

“Oh, uh,” he says. He’s getting jittery again so he makes himself look at Jess, pretend he’s just talking to her. “That white dress,” he says, “with the, um, red belt thing. And you had flowers all up in your hair, those little white ones.”

It’s Jess’s second surprised look in the last five minutes, like it’s not something she thinks he’d remember. Maybe he’s saying too much.

“It took like two days to get all the pin things outta your hair,” he adds, which he remembers because Schmidt pitched a fit about stepping on them in the shower.

His brain gets stuck there somehow and he’s pretty useless for the rest of the interview. Jess had looked—amazing. Ridiculous and perfect and he hadn’t even thought about what she’d wear until he saw her and he actually stopped breathing for a moment.

The whole thing would have been easier to handle if they hadn’t gotten so fancy. He would’ve been able to keep pretending it was just like going to the DMV. He hadn’t even _thought_ about dressing up, until he came out of his room to leave for city hall.

(“Where’s Jess?” he’d asked.

“Getting ready at Cece’s,” Schmidt said. “You’d better hurry up and get dressed, we’re going to be late.”

Nick frowned, looking down at his jeans and flannel.

“I am dressed,” he said and the conversation went downhill from there.

“Really, Nicholas?!” Schmidt yelled after some back and forth. “This is how you want to look on your wedding day?”

“It’s not my wedding day!” Nick had shouted back, looking to Winston for support.

“It’s kind of your wedding day, dude,” Winston had said, shrugging, and Nick knew he was going to lose this fight.)

Under the kitchen table Jess kicks him in the ankle and Nick realizes he’s zoned out and missed Samantha asking him something.

“Sorry, uh,” he says. “What now?”

==

The thing is: Jess _knows_ Nick. Or thought she did. But he keeps calling her bluff. Having all these different sides of him.

She knew default-state Nick who grumbles his way around the apartment and gets in the occasional slapfight with Schmidt or Winston. And Nick her buddy, her pal, who’d split a can of Spaghettios with her or make her a ridiculous mix CD for her hellaciously boring commute. And the Nick behind his bar, easy and capable, and the Nick who yells to hide how freaked out he is by things, and Nick the kind of gross roommate who brings a month’s worth of mugs and dishes out of his bedroom in an armful and doesn’t seem to fully understand the concept of laundry.

But now there are all these other Nicks. The serious person who sat beside her at the bank, jiggling one knee, while they opened a joint account. The one who locked himself up with the pile of confusing insurance paperwork she and Schmidt had been slogging through for weeks and knocked it all out: everything organized and bills paid (half his checks postdated) and then refused to talk to either of them about it.

Nick, waking up at night when she comes back from the bathroom to sleepily mumble something about robots.

The Nick who slides a hand under her ponytail to rest on the back of her bare neck while they’re standing in the doorway saying goodbye to Samantha, making her go still and shivery.


	11. how to up the stakes

“Hey!” Schmidt hollers from the general vicinity of the kitchen table. “Loft meeting, dumbos. Five minutes.”

Nick groans and lifts his head off the couch where he’s sprawled. It’s a Sunday night and he just wants to sleep for a million hours.

“What’s the problem, Schmidty?” he says. “I told you, I’ll fix the faucet drip this week.”

“Not ‘til the meeting is convened, Nick,” Schmidt says officiously, sitting down at the head of the table and Nick groans and pulls himself upright.

When they’re all seated around the table, Schmidt makes a grand arm gesture in Winston’s direction. Winston glances over at Schmidt, then back at Nick and Jess, who are sitting next to each other.

“We think you need to step it up,” he says, folding his arms on the table and leaning forward. “Physical affection-wise.”

“What?” says Jess, frowning in confusion.

“We think you need to suck face,” Schmidt says. 

“What?” Nick says, dropping his chair legs to the ground. “No. Winston, what—no.”

Winston shrugs apologetically.

“Sorry, dude. Desperate times.” He pauses. “To be clear, we mean for the purposes of looking married, not just in general.”

“I’m so sick of that lady sniffing around here,” Schmidt says in his Beginning of a Rant voice. “She’s always poking around in my organized closets and making you two all weird and jumpy and quite frankly I would like this whole investigation situation put to bed so we can all stop imagining how unflattering the orange jumpsuits of prison will be.” He crosses his arms. “Obviously she isn’t getting info to make either a guilty or innocent decision. So yeah. Step up the heat. Mack on each other a little. Act like you’re people who are actually attracted to each other.”

“We act like we’re attracted to each other!” Jess protests. Schmidt raises his eyebrows.

“Do you?” He’s using the voice Nick particularly hates.

“We hold hands,” Jess says. “And… stuff.”

“Look, we all know that marriage means resigning yourself to a tepid sex-purgatory of weeknight missionary position,” Schmidt says, waving a hand dismissively. (“Um, jar,” Winston says.) “But you’re still supposed to be newlyweds. So suck some face.”

“Schmidt—“ Nick starts loudly.

Winston puts up his hands between them.

“Just some kissing and stuff,” he says. “Nothing crazy. Nobody has to take any clothes off. You don’t want to look like you’re trying too hard. But this whole thing—“ He circles his hand in the air to encompass Nick and Jess, who are both now sitting with arms folded. “—would seem a whole lot more realistic and maybe she’d finally be convinced. And then _I_ wouldn’t have to be woken up by any more of her damn snooping.”

Nick’s pulse is jumping and he glances at Jess from the corner of his eye. She’s pulled her mouth into a thoughtful moue and after a minute she huffs out a sigh.

“Fine, sure, whatever,” she says. “But you two aren’t allowed to be there watching.” She points at both Winston and Schmidt. “It would be too weird.”

Nick’s skin feels hot and tight and he can’t look at Jess at all.

“What’s the matter, Jess?” Schmidt teases. “Don’t want constructive criticism on your makeout stylings?”

“ _No,_ ” Jess says, jabbing her finger at Schmidt. “No constructive criticism. And no using the phrase ‘makeout stylings.’” 

Schmidt huffs and rolls his eyes.

“Lord knows Nick never takes my foreplay feedback either,” he mutters. “And I could really up his game.”

“Ewwww,” Winston says, while Nick gives Schmidt his most disgusted look.

“No,” he says, “no no no. No feedback. No kissing. No macking.”

“What’s the matter, Nick?” Winston says. “Afraid of a little roommate PDA? ‘cause that’s not what you told Theodore K. Mullins last night.” He’s grinning, leaning in towards Nick.

“ _No,_ ” Nick says, pointing at him. “Do not.”

“You’ve kissed me,” Schmidt says. “Why not kiss Jess?”

“Yeah, why not kiss me?” Jess joins in, tilting her head to one side.

“I have _not_ kissed you,” Nick says turning his finger to Schmidt. “ _You_ have assaulted _me_.”

“C’mon Nick,” Winston says, spreading his arms. “Kiss us all!”

“What is _wrong_ with you people?!” Nick shouts, pushing his chair back. All three of them are laughing and he glares at all of them. 

“Buncha weirdos,” he mutters and huffs away, pulling up his hoodie as he goes. “And don’t say foreplay, Schmidt!” he shouts without looking back.

==

“… soooo,” Jess says in bed that night. “Are we really gonna do this tomorrow?” The lights are out but he can tell she’s facing him, her arm propped on her hand.

“What?” he says tiredly.

“You know,” she says, fidgeting with the blanket edge. “Suck a little face. Get hot and heavy. Do the tongue-tied tango.”

Nick wrinkles his nose at her and she gives a little sideways nod.

“Okay, maybe not that last one,” she says.

There’s a long pause and Nick realizes he’s supposed to answer. He swallows.

“Oh, that?” he says, closing his eyes and trying to sound casual. “Nah. Don’t sweat it. You don’t have to. Those guys don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“Ah, don’t worry about me,” Jess says. “I can take one for the team. What am I gonna say, ‘oh no, I have to make out with a cute dude’?”

Nick opens one eye and raises an eyebrow at her.

“A cute dude?” he repeats. Jess shrugs, and makes the face that means she’s probably blushing. 

“You scrub up pretty well,” she says and smiles at him. “I’ve seen it.” Nick grins back at her.

“Hopefully not literally,” he says. “I thought Schmidt was the only one allowed to have pervy cameras in the shower.” Jess shudders a little.

“God, I hope you’re joking,” she says.

“Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure I got rid of them all,” he says, straight-faced, and she laughs and lies back down, head on the pillow.

It’s several minutes later when she says his name again.

“So… was that a yes?” she asks the darkness and Nick’s not proud of it, but he definitely pretends to be asleep. After a minute he hears her sigh in irritation and turn over. Karma’s a bitch, though and it takes him a long time to stop thinking about kissing and fall asleep for real.

==

Jess wakes up resolved. She can do this, it’ll be no big thing, and plus it’s not like it’ll even be the first time she’s kissed Nick. Or that he’s kissed her. Not that she’s going to bring that up. She puts on a sundress for confidence, her newest one, with the halter-top and flowers all over it.

She darts little glances at Nick all through breakfast – at Nick and his dumb mouth, which she now can’t seem to stop thinking about. Or looking at, while he chews his cereal or frowns at something he’s reading in one of Schmidt’s _GQ_ s, which Nick swears he never reads even though he routinely does it in plain view.

Samantha’s due to come by at 10 and Jess brushes her teeth twice after breakfast and gargles with mouthwash once. It’s fine, it’s cool, she’s not nervous, she’s just being. Considerate. And thorough about her oral hygiene. Which is very important.

She almost jumps out of her skin when there’s a knock at the door, and has to make herself breathe for a minute while she hears Nick let Samantha in. Jess smooths her hands down over her skirt and heads out to join him.

They have to make this seem natural so she can’t just, like, go lay one on him. Instead she waits until she’s making tea and Samantha’s getting herself set up.

“Hey, Ni—darling?” she says and winces internally. “Can you come reach down the honey for me?”

She hears Nick come up beside her and open the cabinet. The honey’s on the middle shelf, right where it always is, in easy arm’s reach.

“… this honey?” he says, frowning at her as he reaches for it. Jess widens her eyes at him in a way that hopefully conveys _be cool_. He gives her a confused and annoyed frown.

“Thanks, babe!” she says brightly and wraps her hand around his before he can set the honey down. She keeps looking at him, her face turned up, and tugs downward on his hand so he gets the hint. But he doesn’t bend down and oh god, why does he have to make everything so awkward. 

Jess works hard not to look over and see if Samantha is watching them and instead goes up on her toes. Nick’s eyes go wide as if he suddenly realizes what she’s trying to do and he jerks back, pulling his hand out of hers and stepping away. 

“What—“ he starts loudly, then flicks his eyes toward the kitchen table. “What kind of tea is that?”

Jess huffs angrily and grabs the honey from his hand without answering. Strike one.

Her second chance comes when they’re sitting on the couch, where Jess suggested they move because it’s more comfortable. By which she meant she could tuck herself into Nick’s side. He sits super stiff at first, trying as hard as he can to keep space between them without making it look like that’s what he’s doing. But Jess knows that he’s lazy and his memory’s short and sure enough, ten minutes in and he’s forgotten what’s going on enough that he rests his left arm along the back of the couch behind her. Jackpot.

Jess waits until Sam’s asking a tedious, roundabout question about their insurance bills, and crosses her right arm over her chest so she can slip her fingers into Nick’s hand on the couch behind her shoulder. She feels him stiffen and turn his head to look at her, but she keeps nodding intently at what Samantha’s saying and doesn’t look back.

While she’s answering the question, she pulls his hand down so his arm is wrapped around her, fingers still tangled with his hand that’s now resting on her bare upper arm just below her shoulder.

“And how do you feel about kids?” Samantha says. She likes to ask variations on questions they’ve been asked a bunch of times before, to see how things match up. It’s pretty nerve wracking.

Jess answered the last question so she elbows Nick in the side. (Taking turns with questions: a very sensible system for preventing them from blurting out conflicting answers! That sure took them a long time to come up with!) He coughs and stops trying to stealthily slide his hand out of hers.

“Kids, man,” he starts. “They have so many questions. Am I right?” He seems to be waiting expectantly. Instead, both Samantha and Jess frown at him. Nick coughs again.

“Uh, I mean, I’m into babies,” he says in a rush. “That is, I like babies. I mean, I’m good with babies. Weirdly.”

Jess is looking at him in surprise before she realizes it and he catches her look.

“Lotsa cousins,” he says, shrugging, then seems to remember she’s not the person he’s supposed to be answering. “I was kiiind of a babysitting fiend,” he says, turning back to Samantha and grinning a little and Jess sees her chance. She tugs again on his hand, pulling him into her, and leans up to kiss him as he turns his head toward her.

He seems to realize what’s happening just soon enough to turn his head away and Jess’s mouth lands on his stubbly cheek, somewhere between his mouth and his jaw, like she’s an ultra-awkward middle schooler. 

She shrinks back into place, letting go of Nick’s hand, but before she can think of anything to say to make that look less weird, Nick leans down and kisses her temple, like it’s just the normal response to her launching herself at his face. His arm stays around her shoulder, too, and keeps Jess distracted for the rest of the interview: his hand curled around her bicep, the place on her temple where she can still feel the quick press of his mouth. 

It’s not the first time she’s realized it, but it always feels a little strange to think about: that yeah, of course, Nick’s had girlfriends before, he knows how to be boyfriendy and sweet. It’s just odd to be at the receiving end of that and she can’t help but wonder what else he’s like as a boyfriend. Or if this is all an act based on what he thinks husbands are like or should be like. The thought makes her feel even stranger, and she can’t put her finger on why. 

Nick not only keeps his arm around her until Samantha’s leaving, he slides it back around her waist when they’re saying goodbye at the door, one hand resting on her hip like it’s something he does every day.

As soon as the door shuts, Jess pulls away and rounds on him, smacking him in the shoulder.

“Why wouldn’t you kiss me, you jerk?!” she says, feeling embarrassed and furious all at once.

“I told you I wouldn’t!” he says, matching her tone.

“I thought you were joking!” she says. “Way to make me feel like a complete idiot.” She’s got the adrenaline surge of anger working its way through her veins.

“Seriously?" Nick demands. “How is this my fault?”

“Oh my god,” she says, throwing her hands up in the air. “You are so infuriating.”

“ _I’m_ infuriating?!” he says and they’re both yelling now.

“Would it really be that awful?!” she demands. “You didn’t seem to mind before.”

“When I kiss you I don’t want it to be a damn show for someone!” Nick says over her at the same time and in the immediate silence Jess hears her own quick intake of breath. 

Nick’s eyes have gone wide but he’s still looking at her and Jess presses her lips together, breathing hard.

“… when you kiss me?” she says after a moment in a small voice. 

Nick’s standing very still and she thinks he’s going to rephrase but instead he takes a step closer to her.

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice sounds deeper than normal. His eyes haven’t left hers and Jess feels her mouth going dry.

She opens her mouth to ask what that’s supposed to mean, but before she can say anything, Nick ducks his head and presses his mouth against hers.

There’s a very still moment and then she whimpers and pushes _up_ , towards him, into him, and Nick manages to somehow fit his whole body against hers without breaking contact. Jess whimpers again and somehow her arms are wrapped around his neck, her fingers in the hair at the back of his head and oh god, she’s wanted this so much. 

Nick pulls back and stares at her with a look she’s never seen on him before. His eyes are dark and his mouth is open and her arms are still around his neck, his hands on her waist. So she kisses him, turning her head to fit her lips to his. This time he doesn’t pull away.

His hands are on her back, pressing her close, and everything’s happening so fast Jess can’t even think, which is how she always feels at really big moments, like her mind is being neatly bypassed and she’s just _doing_.

“Please tell me this isn’t about Samantha,” Nick gasps into her mouth.

“This isn’t about Samantha,” she says in a rush and he grunts, pressing his mouth to hers again.

She realizes they're trying to move toward the bedroom while they keep kissing; Nick’s backing her up, mouth still on hers, hands on her waist, and Jess is trying to walk backwards and unbutton his shirt and lick up into his mouth all at the same time, their feet a stumbling tangle. With a growl Nick pulls back and lifts her like she weighs nothing, his hands on her ass. Startled, she wraps her legs around his waist automatically. And oh god, then he's kissing her again while he carries her towards the hall and now she's the one above him, his head thrown back to reach hers, her mouth coming down on his.

– and there's a quick knock at the same time as the front door opens. 

"Hi, I forgot my scarf-- _oh_ ," says Samantha. "Oh. I'm—I’m sorry." 

Jess stares at her over Nick's shoulder and she stares back at Jess and Nick stays completely still. Jess lifts one hand from Nick's back to point at the coat rack.

"The green one?" she says.

"Oh, um, yes, yeah, yes," Samantha says, flustered, and grabs at it. For the first time since Jess has known her, she looks actually caught off-guard. "Er, sorry about—sorry." She shuts the door and flees.

There's a long pause and then Jess slides to the ground (over the bulge in Nick’s jeans). He’s staring at her, mouth a little open, breathing hard, and she stares back at him, feeling the swollen throb of her lips.

The laugh bubbles up inside her, surprise and relief coming to a head. He keeps looking at her, dark and intent, and then his face relaxes and he’s laughing too.

“Well, that’s pretty convenient,” he says, eyes crinkling as he smiles down at her and Jess feels something surge in her stomach. Her hands have slid down from his shoulders and now she realizes their fingers are tangling together, down near the hem of her skirt. 

It tugs at something in her chest, how right it feels to fit her hands against his like this. When it’s just the two of them alone. So right that she stretches up on tiptoe and kisses Nick again, very carefully, feeling him go still under her touch.

“Come here,” she says breathlessly and resumes walking backwards to her room, hands still in his.

“—yo!” says Schmidt, banging the front door open. “She gone? You done with the tonsil hockey or are we still banished?”

Jess jerks her hands out of Nick’s without thinking, and he takes a quick step back but doesn’t look away. Her heart is pounding and she feels like she has emotional whiplash.

“Yeah, she’s gone,” she manages to call out and finally breaks Nick’s gaze as Schmidt saunters toward them. She frowns at Schmidt. “You didn’t see her in the elevator?” He shrugs.

“Took the stairs. Calf muscles don’t tone themselves, yo.”

Jess kind of can’t believe this conversation is happening and when she sneaks a glance at Nick he looks just as pained.

“So?” Schmidt goes on. “Did it work? I hope you managed to put on a convincing performance.”

“Uh, yeah,” she says dumbly, then feels a wash of amusement as she remembers. “I think it worked surprisingly well.” When she looks at Nick again he’s smiling at her, just barely, in a way that makes her feel even more flushed.

“Ick,” says Schmidt. “But good job, I guess? Hey, Nick, you said you’d come look at that weird sound the dryer’s making.” 

“… now?” Nick says, looking away from her to frown at Schmidt.

“Um, is there a reason why not now?” Schmidt says and that’s how Jess ends up sitting alone on her bed trying to process everything that just happened.


	12. how to lack a plan completely

He’s got to get her alone again, he has to, but it’s like he’s being pranked by the universe. Nick spends two hours elbows deep in the guts of the dryer as Schmidt hovers and frets about his laundry routine and then Winston decides today's the day he's going to make one of Nick's dreams come true: he wants to hear Nick’s tight five on the Cubs recent performance so he can turn it into a radio segment. Which would be amazing on any day but today.

By the time he realizes Jess has to teach her Saturday afternoon class, she’s about to walk out. Nick looks up from complaining about the Cubs bullpen this year to see her hovering by the door in that ridiculously amazing-looking little dress, all flowers and skin.

“Um, bye guys,” she says, a little stiltedly. “I’ll be back later.”

“Seeya,” Winston says without looking up from his notes. Jess is looking right at Nick, a kind of unreadable expression on her face, and why the hell do they live with so many people.

“See you tonight,” he says, looking at her, and she quirks up one side of her mouth and gives him a little nod. 

==

It’s a Saturday, so he has a shift, because he always has a shift on the weekends, just when closing is a particular nightmare. He’s hoping it’ll be miraculously quiet so he can slip out early and leave the other bartender to close, but of course that doesn’t happen. Even going as fast as he can it’s well past 2 in the morning by the time he makes it home and finds a place to park.

He’s raced all this way but now he realizes he doesn’t know what he’s going to say. Or do. _**Always** have a plan, dude,_ says the Schmidt in his head. _It’s the first rule!_ He really hates the Schmidt in his head.

He hovers on the sidewalk outside their building for a while, waiting to see if anything comes to him. The weight of the past year and a half feels like a wall at his back: so many weeks and months of Jess. Jess wearing her ridiculous little apron in the kitchen while she squabbles with him about whether chocolate chips count as a breakfast food if they’re in pancakes. Jess when they’d realized that her teacher skills translated into being a genius at inventing drinking games: standing on the dining room table doling out penalties and forcing him to remember the words to Yankee Doodle Dandy. Jess giving his arm a little squeeze when they headed into a doctor’s appointment.

Jess after he’d kissed her last time, feeling reckless and terrified, and how it took weeks until things started to feel less jumpy between them. Weeks when he kept trying to figure out if there were some genius combination of words he could come up with to explain himself; to apologize; to let him kiss her again without it seeming like he was taking complete and total advantage of everything she was doing for him. 

Jess in his bed, her soft mouth opening under his. Jess this morning (oh dear god) wrapping her legs around his waist without a second’s hesitation.

==

When Nick eases the front door open he catches the flicker of the tv. It’s on mute and Jess is curled up on her side on the couch. For a moment he thinks she’s watching the infomercial but when she takes a step closer he realizes her eyes are closed.

It’s clever. It’s really clever. If you wanted to avoid sleeping with someone without making it look like that’s what you were doing, this would be the best way to do it. She’s in her pajamas too, with the throw blanket pulled up over her.

The remote control is resting on the couch, in the curve of her torso. He makes his way to the back of the couch and reaches over her to grab it. The room seems extra dark when he turns the tv off. He purposely doesn’t look down at Jess, to see if she’s stirring, to see what she looks like asleep. He knows what she looks like asleep.

Nick scrubs one hand over his face and trudges off to crawl alone into her bed. 

==

This is going to be the Nick’s Bedroom Makeout all over again, she just knows it. Jess fell asleep on the couch waiting to talk to him and then this morning Schmidt was making omelets and Winston was _again_ bothering Nick about baseball and then she had to go meet Cece for a sample sale and there was no way to get a second alone with Nick. Nick who kept catching her eye and then looking away and looking back.

==

It’s dark by the time she gets home and no one’s around. She can see lights on under Winston’s bedroom door and her own. Schmidt must be enforcing Sunday night quiet hours. (“You gotta get a solid eight going into the week if you wanna work hard _and_ pl—“ “—don’t say play hard,” Winston interrupted, “you know that’s on the list of automatic Jar phrases.”)

There’s no sound in her room and Jess gives herself kudos for only hovering nervously in the dark hallway for a couple of minutes. It’ll be okay. She just wants—she doesn’t know what she wants. No, she does know what she wants. She wants him and she doesn’t know when it started but she knows it’s not what she’s been telling herself, that it’s just because they’re playing house. It’s more than that. And older than that.

She knocks lightly and pushes the door open. 

Nick’s not there. His flannel and jeans are thrown across the foot of the bed, though, and the light on his bedtable is on. Jess frowns, stepping out of her shoes and kicking them into the corner.

“—oh,” says Nick in the doorway behind her. He looks surprised to see her, like he wasn’t expecting her, and also he doesn’t have a shirt on. Which would go along with not expecting her. Jess freezes; this hadn’t been in her mental scenario.

“Oh!“ she echoes back. “Sorry, I—”

Nick’s holding a t-shirt and he pulls it over his head quickly. It’s one of the ones she likes, with a slimmer cut, so it’s a little tight on him. Not that she notices things like that. Nick clears his throat and she realizes she’s staring. Good lord.

Jess feels her face heat up as she looks away fast. They’re both standing just inside the doorway now and she clears her own throat, looking back at him.

“So,” she says. And stops. Nick looks pained. Jess bites her lip and crosses her arms over her chest, nervously. “Um,” she says. Stellar, yet again.

Nick’s fidgeting, one hand scratching the back of his head, and then he reaches behind him and pushes the door shut.

Jess feels her mouth go dry. She looks at the door and then at him and his own eyes widen.

“Oh!” he says. “No, I wasn’t—“ 

The door didn’t close completely, just came to rest against the doorjamb. Jess swallows hard and steps forward so she can very carefully reach around Nick and turn the handle. 

The click as she shuts it all the way sounds incredibly loud and Jess can feel her pulse going a mile a minute. She’s standing so close to him she can feel his body heat and before she looks up she thinks please please please.

When she does look up, Nick is staring at her, a very different expression on his face than the one he had a minute ago. His eyes are dark and his chin is squared and he holds her gaze for a long moment, like he’s giving her time to step away. And then he’s on her. His hands on her back and his mouth on her mouth and his whole entire body pressed against her, bending her backwards just a bit, like they’re in an old-timey black and white movie, except she’s seen a lot of those and they don’t usually involve the heroine’s ass getting grabbed, which is what Nick is doing to her right now, which she is _all about_ and holy hell she wants him so badly she can barely breathe.

When they break for air, Nick stays pressed close to her, one hand spread between her shoulderblades. His eyes are searching her face and when she starts to smile, his own grin breaks over his face, eyes surprised. 

Jess looks behind her, over her shoulder at the bed, the one he’s slept in with her so many frustrating nights now, keeping careful inches of space between them. She glances back at Nick and sees he’s followed her gaze. Jess bites her lip as he brings his eyes back to her.

“Come to bed?” she says, feeling shy and silly and ridiculous and desperate all at the same time.

He answers with a kiss (his hand in her hair, his tongue against hers) which, she’s starting to realize, is how he answers a lot of things.


	13. how to win the game

They make it to bed, stumbling and kissing, hands frantic against each other, and when Jess’s knees hit the back of the bed she goes down and Nick comes with her, crawling up her body as she uses her elbows to shimmy backward across the mattress.

“Oh, god, Nick,” she says in something awfully close to a moan as he scrapes his teeth against just exactly the right spot on the side of her neck.

She feels desperate and thrilled and like her heart’s going to beat out of her chest. There’s this frantic feeling surging through her, like something’s going to happen to stop them and make this all burst like a bubble. She scrabbles for the hem of Nick’s t-shirt, on his back, and pulls it up up up until he has to sit back a little to let her pull it over his head. 

She pulls him back down right away, sliding her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck and arching up against him, his chest, all that hot skin.

Nick lets out a little groan into her mouth and starts working on the buttons of her shirt (why did she wear something with so many buttons?!). He’s rocking some scruff and it’s rough against her skin, driving her out of her mind, while he leaves wet kisses across her collarbone and down over the skin revealed as he unbuttons her shirt.

“Oh my god, I wanted this so much,” she gasps against him and feels his head come up.

“You did?” he says, fingers going still in the middle of undoing the last button on her shirt.

Jess presses her lips together, feeling suddenly shy. She nods just a little. Nick’s staring at her and she can’t read his face.

“I thought—“ she says because she can’t stand the silence. “It’s not just all—this.” She gestures at the bed. As if on automatic, Nick finishes undoing the last of her buttons and slips his hands under to curve around her waist. She draws in a quick breath. God, his hands are big. And warm. “I thought about it before.”

Nick kisses her again (the contrast of his wet mouth and stubble scraping over her face) and rests his forehead against hers.

“God, Jess,” he says, his voice ragged. “You have no idea.”

And then he’s sliding her shirt off her shoulders. Jess is propped on her elbows and she reaches behind herself to undo her bra and slip it off in one smooth motion. Nick’s eyes go wide, like he wasn’t expecting that, and he jerks his gaze up to her face. He keeps his eyes on hers even as his hands tighten a little on her waist and she can hear his breathing pick up. It’s just about the sweetest thing she can imagine, his careful not looking, and she wants to laugh and kiss him all at once.

Instead she quirks a smile at him, feeling brave and exposed in equal parts.

“You can look,” she says. “It’s okay.”

He drops his eyes and the look that comes over his face is amazing. Jess feels something thrill through her. He slides his hands up to cover her breasts, cupping them and she pushes up into him. Nick catches her nipples between his thumb and forefinger, pulling just a little and she whimpers, arching more.

“God,” he says in a voice that sounds awed, “you’re gorgeous.”

Hearing it from him – from _him_ – and in that tone makes Jess go hot all over. She lies back on the bed and Nick follows, chasing her mouth. He’s kissing her slowly now, long sweeps of his tongue that make her feel wet and needy. Her legs are bent and she spreads them a little more, letting Nick settle in between them. It makes her tilt her pelvis up, trying to rub against the bulge in his pants.

Nick laughs a little against her mouth, a low, pleased sound that makes her stomach turn over. He’s had a hand on her hip and he slides it down and under the hem of her skirt, to brush his knuckles against the damp crotch of her panties. She’s so turned on already that even a touch this light shoots through her like electricity, like there should be a warning sign somewhere around here. Danger, high voltage. Jess bucks up against his hand and in one motion he pushes her underwear to the side and slides a thumb inside her.

She’s not expecting it and lets out a gasp that’s almost a shriek. Nick pulls back to watch her face and slides his thumb slickly in and out of her, the rest of his hand curving under her ass to cup her.

“Nick—“ she says, whimpering, and the look on his face makes her shiver – evil and pleased. He leans in again ‘til his lips are almost touching hers. 

“You’re so wet,” he breathes against her mouth and she moans, tilting her hips so she’s even more open to him. He’s right, she’s soaking wet, so turned on, and the thought that he knows just exactly what he does to her is mind-blowingly hot and overwhelming all at once.

Achingly slowly, Nick slides his thumb all the way out of her, then moves up to circle her clit, his touch slick. It’s almost too much.

Jess slides her own hand down between them, groping only a little, ‘til she finds the shape of his cock pressing against the front of his sweatpants. She palms it, squeezing a little, and it’s Nick’s turn to groan, his eyes fluttering shut and his hand going still against her. It’s so not even close to enough, though, and she slips her hand inside his waistband until she can take him in her hand, skin against hot skin.

Jess slides her hand up his shaft, stroking once, twice, feeling him out. It’s almost strange how strange this _isn’t_ and she’s so, so desperate for him.

“Nick,” she says, and he opens his eyes to look up at her. “I want you. I want you _now_ —please –.”

He doesn’t argue, just slides off the side of the bed to shuck off his pants and boxers all in one go, his dick springing free. Jess bites her lip, looking at him, but he doesn’t pause, reaching under her skirt to slide her panties down over her hips. It messes with her mind a little bit, watching Nick’s hands slide them off her ankles. This is really truly going down.

“Take off your skirt,” he says, voice low, and her stomach flips. Jess reaches behind her to undo the zipper, lifting her hips off the bed so she can shimmy out of it. 

“Condoms,” she says breathlessly as she does, nodding towards her bedtable. “Bottom drawer.”

To her relief, he doesn’t blink, just goes for one. They’ve been lying sideways on the bed all this time and from where she is, Jess reaches out to tug the sheets down, with the vague idea of swiveling to lie in the right direction. Nick’s hand on her ankle stops her, though.

“C’mere,” he says, and pulls her to the edge of the bed in one quick motion. Now one of her legs is dangling off the bed and the other is bent, her ankle still in his hand and he leans down to kiss her again. It’s slow at first but quickly gets serious and props to Nick’s multitasking skills as he gathers her up and turns them both, pushing the sheets away and laying her down, head on an actual pillow.

Jess finds herself looking up at him and smiles instinctively.

“Hi,” she says, feeling a little shy, and the grin he gives her makes her feel warm all over.

“Hey,” he says, voice husky, and slips a leg between hers. Jess inhales sharply as his thigh presses against her, then shifts so she’s rocking against it, riding him a little. She is still so desperate for him and when she reaches down she realizes that at some point he managed to put the condom on.

“Oh, god, yes,” she says, and spreads her legs wider, trying to make room for him, but he surprises her by flipping them over instead.

Now she’s on top, his thigh still between her legs, and he wraps his hands around her hips to shift her, touch firm. He moves her so she’s straddling him, his dick pressing up against her, and she whimpers, rubbing herself along its length.

Nick’s hands tighten on her hips and she grins at the look on his face.

“Tease,” he mumbles, and she reaches behind her to guide him inside.

It’s good that she’s on top because it’s been a while and she’s tight and it turns out Nick’s not a small guy. She eases herself back onto him, pausing as she goes to let herself adjust. Nick’s eyes are all over her face, his breathing shallow and fast and his hands still tight on her hips.

He slides one hand down, circling her clit as she keeps rocking back onto him, and it’s so good, it makes everything else in her feel good, most especially how he’s stretching her and filling her.

Her eyes are closed but she opens them when she’s finally settled as far down on him as she can go.

“Yeah?” she says, a little breathless, and he swallows hard, nodding a little, without stopping the little circles his fingers are making between her legs. Jess leans forward, her hair falling around their faces like a curtain, like a cave, hands braced on Nick’s chest. When she starts moving, Nick matches her, thrusting up as she presses down, and it only takes a moment for them to get the rhythm right.

She’d thought they might be good at this, but it’s so much more than she expected. Nick holding her steady, letting her set the pace, his eyes wide as he watches her. She’s starting to sweat and Nick slides his hand from between her legs and up over her stomach to palm her breast. He pinches her nipple, twisting it a little, and she swears and smiles and he smiles and bites his lip and neither of them stop moving.

“Hey, hey, hang on,” he says breathlessly and she’s barely paused when he flips them over, managing to stay inside her as he does. Jess lets out a startled little laugh and damn she could get used to being manhandled like this, like he knows exactly where he wants her.

She’s on her back now and Nick’s over her, propped on his elbows, and this is _good_ , this is so good. Jess wraps her legs around his waist and pulls him down for a kiss. He starts moving slowly, carefully and this position means he’s hitting her in some exciting new places. 

Jess whimpers with each thrust and he takes the hint and picks up speed, pulling his mouth from hers to press his face into her shoulder. Now her whimpers are coming out in breathy little explosions each time he pushes into her and she fits a hand between them so she can touch herself.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she says and hears his quick intake of breath. “Nick—.” He slides his hands up under her shoulder blades, so he can wrap his fingers over her shoulders for leverage. He’s holding her in place now, fucking her hard, and she lets out a jumbled stream of yes yes yesyesyes.

She’s going to come soon, she can feel it building, and she squeezes Nick tighter with her legs and hangs on, letting it rumble towards her.

“Yeah,” she says, hoping he knows that means to keep doing what he’s doing. “Yeah yeah yeah—”

Nick’s mouth is on her throat, making her feel shivery in all the right ways and fuck fuck this is Nick, he’s going to see her come, he’s the one making her come, he—

It sweeps over her hard and fast and her mind goes bright and blank. She’s dimly aware of letting out a string of ragged noises, tightening around him, arching into him. 

It’s so good. It’s so good with him.

When she opens her eyes finally, he’s gone still above her, grinning a little. It’s the same expression she can feel on her own face and she can’t help it, she starts laughing weakly, overwhelmed.

Nick’s smile gets wider and he starts moving again. Jess feels languid and sensitive in a delicious way, every stroke ringing out little aftershocks of her orgasm. She unwraps her legs from around his hips and plants her feet on the bed, tilting her hips up so he can go deeper.

He drops his head, face pressing into her shoulder and she wants to make him come, she wants it so badly. The thought of making him – Nick! – lose control like that is kind of blindingly hot. Plus he definitely deserves it after what he’s just done for her.

She can still feel him holding back a little, trying not to drive all the way into her and she presses her nails into his back.

“Yeah,” she says, the words bubbling out of her. “Oh god, yeah. You can—harder.” He takes the cue, driving all the way into her in a way she feels right down to her toes.

“God, Jess,” he mutters against her skin. “You feel so good.” 

It sends a jolt of electricity through her and she whimpers a little. And then, oh, _oh_ , he’s coming, groaning into her shoulder, hips slowing and finally going still.

Jess can feel his heart pounding against her chest, the sweat where their skin is sticking together, the short hairs at the base of his skull when she slides her fingers over his neck.

Nick takes a deep shuddering breath and lifts his head to look at her. She bites her lip but can’t stop smiling. Her cheeks are aching with it and he takes another deep breath and starts to smile back, a chuckle rumbling up from somewhere inside of him.

“… wow,” he says and Jess laughs, suffused with good feeling. It’s like a fever has broken or a cool front has finally swept in, after months of heavy, humid air.

“Wow, yourself,” she says, winding her fingers further into the hair at the back of his head. Nick bites his lip, still smiling at her and pulls out carefully, rolling off her to collapse onto the other pillow.

Jess rolls on her side so she’s facing him, tucking a hand under her pillow. The enormity of what just happened keeps hitting her. In a way she feels relieved, though; no more wondering if or when this is going to happen. No more holding her breath.

Nick turns his head toward her, eyes drooping a little. He looks blissed out and amazed and even with him right here next to her, even with everything they just did, she feels overwhelmed with the amount she _wants_ him, wants to see that expression on his face, wants get to look at him like this, close up, without having to glance away. 

“Hey,” she says softly, and he turns the rest of the way to face her. It’s not entirely dissimilar from what it’s been like these past few months, having him sleep here. Except for the whole part where they’re naked and where she can’t stop smiling and where he’s looking at her like that.

“Hi,” he says, and surprises her by leaning in to kiss her. That’s going to take some getting used to. But she’s not complaining.

This kiss is light and soft, just near the corner of her mouth, and the opposite of everything she thought she knew about how he kissed. His hand is in her hair, one thumb sweeping across her cheekbone and she feels something inside of her give way, some fear she hadn’t known she had.

Their knees and ankles are tangling together, such a contrast from months of jerking away whenever they accidentally touched under the covers. 

Nick’s hand is still on her, sweeping over her shoulder like he can’t get enough of touching her, of how her skin feels against his. She knows what that’s like. Right now she thinks it’s a feeling she could just ride out forever.

**Author's Note:**

> This is FAR AND AWAY the longest fic I've ever written, so thanks again to everyone who helped me think it through or put up with me talking about it for the past several months!
> 
> If you found the investigation stuff interesting, a lot of this actually happens, although in a slightly different context; you can read more here: [NYT: Do You Take This Immigrant?](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/nyregion/13fraud.html?pagewanted=all)


End file.
